There were queues for any kind of product. It depended on the circumstances, on the period. (I. H., S. R.-B., 132).

When I queued I was reading or writing because otherwise I would have gone mad. The people around, especially since most of them were retired, talked only about troubles and scarcity and ?generally, it was much better not to listen. It happened to me once, while I was standing in a queue for butter, to witness how a man in front of me started to swear: ?the hell with Ceausescu and everything, and?? I do not know what else. Suddenly two men came to him and took him away. I also witnessed something in 1989, when a person was taken from the middle of the boulevard because he had some papier-mâché thing stuck on his sleeve; it was something with a chain tied to a cannon ball and a big placard with something written on it, something with Ion Barbu, the poet. I do not know who he was, or what actually happened, maybe a writer using this pseudonym, who was manifesting his dissatisfaction or his revolt in this way. As long as the cars could move, on the boulevard, namely between two traffic lights, the drivers tried to keep the police cars away from him. But when the traffic light stopped them they could no longer help him in any way? Yet I could feel in the air a sort of solidarity of the people. (A. S., 130)

There was a joke in those years about a person living in Bucharest who heard that there was meat in a store in Brasov, so he hurried to the station and he asked for a ticket to Brasov, yet he got a ticket only as far as Ploiesti. The ticket seller explained that the queue had already reached Ploiesti. The protagonists of another joke are a young girl, who had just been saved from drowning, and her rescuer. The girl wants to reward him and the latter asks for one night of her life. With great reluctance, she accepts, and instantly the man?s face becomes radiant and he tells her: You must queue for meat all night and my wife comes in the morning and takes your place. The point of the joke is obvious: the queue as a means of survival is more important than sex, and if somebody saves your life you can pay your debt by saving him from a queue. I remember a queue for potatoes in the Matache Market. The seller, who was drunk, could not control the queue, and withdrew. Every buyer wanted to chose his potatoes, to buy as many ?good? potatoes out of the heap of rotten potatoes, yet the seller?s duty was not to allow them to choose in any way. I started rummaging very carefully. When I raised my eyes, I suddenly saw a well dressed lady, with a bourgeois appearance, just like me, we looked at each other and we understood straight away the peculiarity of our situation: we were both looking for food in the garbage. The queue became something as common as poverty and so natural that we could hardly see the deep humility of the fact. It was the ordinary every day life, which could not surprise or revolt, the life that you live as such, without questions. It was the queue.