Oh, get a move on.....!

Always fascinating when you come across a personal experience and suddenly realise that it is proving some theory you have read about.  Coming back through Arrecife airport the other week, there was (most unusually for that airport) a long queue to get through security.  So we joined the end and for some time nothing moved, then we moved on for a bit, then stopped again, and so on and so on.  And I suddenly realised that when I wasn't moving I was feeling tetchy and cross, but when I was moving, even though we were only moving slowly, and I knew we would probably stop again, I suddenly felt much better.  And I remembered an article I had read about the psychology of queueing, which said that research had found that, provided the queue is moving, however slowly, those queueing will be content, whereas what people find infuriating is "dead time" when nothing is (or appears to be) happening.  It's the same idea behind variable speed limits on motorways - people are much happier crawling at 25 mph than stuck in a stationary tail-back.