I’m a patient man (sort of—impatience seems to be one of the fiery Scotch-Irish traits that runs through my otherwise English ancestry), but I’ve learned that waiting in lines is a major test of one’s patience.

I usually am threading a fifteen-minute-or-less needle throughout my day, so that everything hinges on the ability of myself (easy) and other people (questionable) to do their jobs efficiently, or at least in a timely manner.  I’m blessed in that God usually has an Eye out for me, and I’ve managed to pull off some spectacular feats of scheduling derring-do.

That said, I’m growing increasingly aware of the blasé attitude that is even more pervasive in the service industry, an industry that attracts either hyper-scrupulous worker bees or hyper-lazy minimum wage slaves.  There doesn’t seem to be much in-between.  Unfortunately, the wage slaves seems to be winning the day.

Whatever the reasons—corporate greed slashing wages to the bare-bone; excessive government entitled spending that encourages able-bodied losers to stay home; or just a general civilizational decline in the willingness and ability to do work, even the unpleasant kind—things seem to be getting simultaneously more and less efficient.  Artificial intelligence and our smartphones have streamlined ordering and directions, but there still has to be a human at the other end to flip the burger or the switch.

That’s been my experience a bit this week, as I’ve spent an inordinate length of time standing in lines.  That’s inevitable, of course, even in the most magical place in the world.

Standing in line (or “on line,” as our New Yorker [I originally misattributed this expression to the English; my apologies to my friends across the pond. —TPP] friends confusingly and wrongly put it—I’m no on top of the line, I am a part of it—ergo, “in line”), I’ve come away with a few observations:

• Having an iPhone sure comes in handy, both to pass the time and as a child mollification device
• People will go wherever and do whatever they are told to do as long as a teenager in a costume says it with enough authority
• Any sense of agency is lost in a line (see the second bullet point), as you’re essentially human cattle filtered through a never-ending maze of turnstiles and themed rooms, never quite sure how much longer you have until you get to the ride

As such, standing in line is a bit like Purgatory—just waiting and suffering until you finally reach something better.