Aislefret

aislefret (EYE-ul-fret), noun. The condition that begins the moment you commit to one checkout queue and lasts until you have paid, marked by a continuous sideways assessment of every other queue in the shop. It strikes in large supermarkets and tiny corner shops alike. You stand with your basket, weighing up the options, then choose. And from that instant onwards, some quiet part of your mind keeps watching the other queues, just in case you have made a terrible mistake.

The word joins aisle with fret, in its old sense of something that wears away at a surface by rubbing. Aislefret is a wearing rather than a panic. Nobody has ever been truly distressed by it, but nobody has ever entirely enjoyed a queue again after learning the word. It is closely related to lanegrief, the motorway version, and to the lesser-known platformdoubt, felt on train platforms about which carriage will stop nearest the exit.

The classic form has three stages. First comes the choosing, done at speed and on evidence you have no time to check: how full the trolleys are, how many items are in each basket, whether that till light is on or merely warm. Then comes the doubt, which arrives the moment the queue beside you moves forward. Finally comes the reckoning, when the person who was behind you at the door is served first, does not look back, and leaves you deciding what kind of person you are going to be about it.

Usage: “He suffered a mild aislefret, switched queues once, and finished eleven places behind the man he had been standing next to at the start, who by then had gone home.” Seasoned sufferers recognise a special variant, the reverse aislefret, which occurs on the rare occasions your own queue moves fastest. It brings no joy whatsoever, only a vague suspicion that something is about to go wrong with the card machine.

Behind the joke is something almost everyone recognises. When we wait in a line, we tend to notice the moments our queue stands still far more than the moments it moves, and we remember the times someone overtook us much more clearly than the times we overtook them. Being stuck feels personal, while moving along smoothly passes without a thought. So the other queue can seem to race ahead even when, on average, it is doing nothing of the kind.

So the next time aislefret takes hold, there is an easy cure. Pick a queue, then stop checking the others. Look at the magazines, read the labels in your basket or chat with the person in front. You will very probably reach the till at much the same time as you would have done anyway, and far less worn. And if the queue next door really does fly past, simply wave. They were only ever in a hurry to leave.