There are certain things that should not, under any circumstances, take half an hour. Boiling an egg seems like the most obvious example. Any kind of ‘fast’ food, obviously (to order, eat, and clean up after in full). Buying a stamp. Getting petrol.
Unfortunately the latter impacted very badly on the sanity of my evening when I was forced to spend 28 minutes waiting in a car for petrol, or the opportunity to avail of the petrol-provision services at the garage of choice. It’s the kind of situation that only occurs in a very specific, extreme, circumstance.
We arrived at the station, realising pretty quickly that there was something amiss. Handwritten signs are never a good sign (if you’ll pardon the probable pun). For a start, it suggests that a unique situation has arisen which has never before been faced. Thus, there is no solution obvious to the frankly incompetent staff. Stupendous.
12 pumps. 2 featuring petrol. At a petrol station. Am I the only one who sees those sums as being a bit askew? The obvious comedy value of fellow patrons completely missing the point of the aforementioned handwritten signs wore off after the first ten minutes, giving way to sheer unadulterated frustration, and the kind of piercing headache you can only get from petrol fumes. Bliss. Or, not…
I don’t understand why such simple situations are made deliberately difficult. Everyone who has a full drivers license presumably has some level of basic competence in dealing with everyday situations. Everyone has seen those “one way system in operation” signs - would it take so much for a dozen or so supposedly intelligent beings to instigate such a system without the help of a pre-placed signalling system?
Traffic chaos caused by a division of six. Absolutely ridiculous, and that was before anyone tried to pay the highly, highly incompetent garage staff. Just as well we didn’t want snacks. The only thing more antagonising than their obvious inability to perform basic tasks was the bizarre attitude of the man at the front of the queue, who decided to park his car, at one of the only two functioning pumps, disappear off to pay, come back, slowly, and start wiping and polishing parts of his car. With half a dozen cars lined up behind him.
Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to be sympathetic to your fellow men. When they’re polishing something - anything - it seems that much more difficult. When it’s a car? God help them, all…
