The unwritten rule in Germany is Ordnung muss sein, which roughly translates to Order is imperative. I guess they teach this rule at a pretty early age in Germany based on my trip to the post office.
I was standing in a line that seemed like it would never move. As luck had it, the process “improved” when the parent of a couple of small children got to the front of the line. The children were free to be themselves. There wasn’t that much to see or do but at the post office there was a series of metal each larger than the last.
One little boy discovered that he could hit it and it would make wonderful banging noises and vibrate slowly into silence. The prospect of standing there listening to this for five to twenty minutes seemed like a punishment until an unexpected little savior showed up – his smaller sister.
She didn’t like all the noise that her brother was making so every time he started making noise she would stop it in its tracks. One making noise wasn’t so much fun but watching the two of them interact wasn’t too bad, especially as the little one was trying to keep the noise level down.