The underlying anger in us all rears its ugly head.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. I was working, doing my simplistic job that could be done by any creature with vertebra: Take order. Make order. Dispense order to customer. Take money. Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
It was much like any other Tuesday afternoon without a hint of discomfort in the air (apart from the usual nagging feeling that everyone who has worked for a major coffee franchise has on a regular basis that your life is being whittled away minute by minute). Due to my general apathy for my job, a line was building up steady, at least seven or eight people long. The line was the usual mix of customers. There were students, with their gentile chit chat about seminars and exams. There were radically obsessive tourists who needed to document the most trivial examples of “Englishness” with their overly expensive cameras. The usually post-work white collar workers, eager to get their latte’s before having to return home and complete all the paperwork that inevitably eluded them during their 9-5 shift. Basically the usual slack jawed faces I’ve come to despise.
The incident took place as one of the office slaves approached the front of the queue. He was proceeded by a tender old lady and a young, blonde student. As our balding office anti-hero took a look around the shop, the student in front took off her jumper and revealed another, different coloured t-shirt.
Our balding, uptight office anti-hero did not see this action and, seeing a different coloured top in front of him, assumed that someone had jumped the queue.
“Excuse me,” he said to the girl, “But I believe you jumped the queue.” There was no hint of menace of malice in his voice. It was balanced and under control.
The girl turned around in surprise and politely told him that she had been here all the time.
His left eye began to twitch. “No. You weren’t.” He turned to me. “Excuse me, but this girl just pushed in front of me.”
In my politest, if-my-boss-didn’t-force-me-to-wear-this-smile-i-would-have-spat-in-your-face smile, I said, “No sir. She’s next in the queue.”
The twitch turned into a tremor, the tectonic plates of his skull started to grind up against each other. His voice started to rise. “I’ve been waiting here for fifteen minutes and I don’t expect someone to jump in front of me.”
The girl was clearly not used to this sort of confrontation. Her voice and demeanor suggested that she was raised somewhere in which violent conflict did not generally take place unless it was a gang of hounds tearing apart a fox. Human violence was as strange and foreign to this girl as shopping at Asda. However, impressively, she stood her ground and refused to budge.
Once again, sensing some sort of human carnival was about to unfold, I said that she had not jumped the queue and he would have to wait to be served.
It was the final straw. The pressure had built up too much. The tremors turned into a full blown earthquake and the epicenter was his mouth.
“THAT’S PATHETICS. THAT’S JUST FUCKING TYPICALLY PATHETIC.” The anger was directed at the girl not myself. “YOU’RE A FUCKING PATHETIC JOKE.”
Everyone in the coffee shop stared at him, mouths gaping in disbelief. The girl was positively broken. Hunched and scared, tears started to run down her face.
I had had a feeling something was coming but I had never anticipated that the final quake was going to be of such a high magnitude. I was taken a back just like everyone else. The thought process was probably the same for everyone: “Isn’t this is pleasant Britain, where everyone is quietly polite?” Perhaps you expect this level of verbal abuse of a Saturday night in a city centre, with pissed up revelers voicing their opinions before smashing pint glasses over each others heads, but a Tuesday afternoon in a high street coffee shop? How very inappropriate.
I finally composed myself and managed the rather feeble, “I think it’s best if you leave, sir.” (notice how it is not a command but a suggestion and I still use the formal address of sir. God, I’m pathetically British). The man stormed out leaving in his wake stunned customers and a sobbing girl. I gave the girl her coffee for free and later, when the queue had died down, went up to check on her. The tears had stopped but she was still visibly shaken. There was not much else I could do but justify that the guy was probably a mentalist.
This is just one example of the unhealthy suppression of feelings that we bottle up for too long as we are swept along in uncomfortable masses, doing jobs we hate for people we despise. People have a breaking point. It seems that British people’s breaking point harder than most peoples to reach. But when they do it’s a spectacularly horrific. It’s a good thing we don’t all have guns.