Don’t you just hate it when a plan doesn’t come together? This could be any plan, but today I’m talking about a specific plan.
At this point I should probably outline what that plan is, but I was thinking of stringing out this sentence anyway because I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to write about this whole plan not coming together thing.
Well, okay then, the plan I refer to is this – thinking you can get into a shop and out again in a specific time frame. By specific, I mean, quickly.
I thought I could do that today. In fact I was pretty certain that I’d be able to do it, and then things all just went horribly wrong.
At the start though everything seemed to be going quite smoothly.
For a start I was on my own, so therefore I knew there would not be any unnecessary interruptions or distractions. In itself that could have been worth anything from between ten minutes to an hour, so I was confident that I could get in, pick up the things I needed to get and then, get out again inside twenty minutes. That was the plan.
On top of that, there were also plenty of handy parking spaces, something that is not always the case and thirdly I had even remembered to bring not just the right coin for the trolley, but also my own bags for the shopping.
Now all I had to do was – get in, get the stuff and get out.
And again it seemed that things were going well, until that dreaded of times – going to the checkout.
Maybe it is just me, but somehow I always seem to manage to select the queue that moves the slowest and that always seems to happens no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
I was bearing this in mind when I scanned along all twenty checkouts today. There were two or three that I ruled out right away.
The self-service things for a start. Have you ever used those self-service yokes? They are a disaster!
I thought the whole point of them was to try to speed things up.
A lot of time you have to scan, re-scan and eventually ask the person from the shop to come and help. Surely it would just be quicker to put an ordinary till on and get that person from the shop to scan the stuff.
Anyway the self-service checkouts were ruled out as were the three tills next to them where the queue had stretched to six trolleys.
But down at the end, furthest away from the doors, the queues at the checkouts were shorter and it was there I found myself having to make the decision – which queue do I join?
In the end I found what I thought was the perfect checkout. There was only one trolley at the till and the customer had most of the goods out and on the belt.
What I didn’t bank on was the slowest checkout operator of all time.
Within the first half hour I think I had come up with any number of names for her, ranging from the ‘Slowy Gonzalez’ to ‘Stupid…
Oh yeah, it wasn’t actually a half hour, it just felt like it.
It was just 14 minutes. But, seriously, fourteen minutes at one till behind one customer.
Maybe this checkout operator was a person who read that tortoise and the hare story and actually believed it.
I felt like telling her that in the real world, the tortoise wouldn’t win, that people liked fast food and fast cars and especially fast queues in supermarkets.
In fact I felt like calling for a manager and asking why somebody so slow would be put in such a position of importance.
Instead I just stood grumbling (into myself at that - not even out loud!), checking my watch and thinking, I’m going to write about this when I get home.
Well, I suppose at least that was one plan that did come together…
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