I’ve a big thing about people watching, and the other day found myself in the perfect situation for doing just that when I came barreling ’round the corner into what was supposed to be a “quick” collection and came face to face with a 3 hour queue. Not really what I was hoping to see, but it was a fabulous sunny day, a reasonably pleasant location, I had coffee and a butty to munch, so all was not as hideous as it could’ve been.
The three trucks in front of me had evidently drawn the same conclusion, and there was much draping of feet across dashboards, paper-reading, laptop unfurling and snoozing going on. Myself, I like to stitch tapestries in my free time, so it made no difference to me where I was doing it, and if I got bored of that there was always a good book or the internet.
Cue the arrival of a fifth truck. Oh dear, suddenly the end of the world was, in fact, nigh. First our man scurried into the booking office like a rat deserting a sinking ship to find out what we’d already told him – that we were, indeed, the queue. Next he came stomping out wailing about the 3 hour wait – because, after all, the rest of us didn’t already know that – and how his box was a ship catcher and he had to get loaded quick, blah blah blah. Mine was as well, incidentally, but it either got there in time or it didn’t, I wasn’t going to get stressed about something which wasn’t, ultimately, my responsibility.
He followed all this by knackering up the neat little system we had going to fit us all in to what was quite a small yard by charging forward the second the front motor went on the bay, blocking everyone else and stopping the lorry that had just been loaded from leaving, which slowed the whole process up yet more, before treating us to a good two hours of increasingly irate phone calls to his office, all made in the middle of the yard for everyone to hear, and none of which appeared to get him any closer to jumping the line, at which point his mate turned up and we reran the whole lot again in stereo.
In the meantime, the rest of us just quietly dozed, chatted, sunbathed, read, stitched, established that the only person causing a fuss was also the only person paid by the hour and therefore earning any money out of the delay, and generally enjoying what can best be described as a Busman’s Holiday – after all, as we said to each other at the time, we wouldn’t have been doing anything different had we been at home.
One by one we eventually left, all looking refreshed and perky, ready to continue with our day’s drive to wherever. As I drove out of the gate, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, I glanced across at our resident stress heads, both of whom looked hot, sweaty, ragged and like they’d just done 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, and wondered whether it had really been worth all that fuss. After all, they hadn’t got loaded any quicker. Oh well, each to their own, I guess…
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