ALWAYS IN THE SLOW LANE: DESTINY OR JUST A COGNITIVE BIAS

I was in the supermarket yesterday. Before getting in the queue to pay I surveyed the different queues. There were long queues at most of the isles. Everyone had decided to do there shopping at the same time as me. One isle had only four persons. I ran and stood behind them. Three people in the front finished quite quickly and I thought I will certainly be able to go to the library and get some books before it closes in half an hour's time. How wrong was I?

The lady in front of me was thirty something, good looking and smartly dressed: a professional type. I would have never imagined she would do that. Before paying she took out a wad of vouchers from her designer purse and gave them to the till girl. She checked them, one by one and said to the lady that none of them were related to the items she had bought. The lady said that she bought the face cream and the butter only because of the vouchers and asked the till girl to return them. The girl was apparently new and did not know how to do that and raised her hand to get the supervisor. He was helping at the other till. He came after about ten minutes and started showing the girl how to do this. The other longer queues were going much faster. Finally the girl managed to return the cream and butter and the lady put her card in the pin machine to pay. I was holding by breath. Luckily the card was accepted and the till started printing her receipt. I pushed my things nearer the till in anticipation that my waiting was finally over. How wrong was I? Printing machine stopped, paper had finished. The girl raised her hand for the supervisor and whole scenario was replayed again, in slow motion. At least it felt like that to me.
I have noticed that it is the same at airports. When I stand in the queue for check in, when I wait for my luggage to come and when I go through the customs and immigration, the adjacent lines always seem to be moving faster. When there is a partial traffic jam on the multilane highways my lane always moves slower. When I change the lane to move in a faster lane, soon it becomes the slowest lane.
Is the universe always contriving to inconvenience me?
That's it. When one starts blaming the universe, fate or destiny, it is time to look rationally for an explanation. Where does one look for it? The internet, of course. Where else?
I soon found it is not only me but most of the human population have or had the same experience. But if every one thinks they are always in a slow moving line then who are in the fast moving ones? Looking for an answer in the word wide web is just that. The critical word is world wide. Like searching for a needle in hay stack. But I kept at it and finally got an explanation. Eureka!
The lines move slower or faster randomly. A chance of being in a slow or fast lane or ones chosen lane becoming slower or faster is totally random. If one queues often enough, his chances of being in a slow or fast lane are ultimately equal. He only becomes aware of the other line moving faster when he is in a slow lane. One tends not to notice or there is no reason to notice when one is moving faster.
That is why you do not remember or recall the incidences when you were moving faster. Also that when you are in a slow line, you are staying at the scene of occurrence longer than when you are in a faster lane, be it supermarket, airport or the motorway. So the slow lane incident gets a longer memory exposure.
This is an example of a cognitive bias mainly due to recall bias and/or selection bias. Bias or not, it is certainly true that even if you are in a slower or a faster lane for equal number of times, overall you spend more time in a slower lane.
Now I know the theory. I just have to learn to live with it.