When we woke up this morning, as we were drinking our first cup of tea, we made a plan for the day. It was a good plan, and we were both looking forward to putting the plan in to action.
The plan did not survive first contact with The Lad. He phoned us and within the first ten words of his call demolished our plan, and replaced it with his plan. As it happened, his plan was quite acceptable so neither of us were very stressed about the change.
Both plans included a need for me to go to the shop. List in hand, off I depart, and proceeded to fill my trolley with the various necessary items, and I arrived at the till.
Don’t worry, everything was OK, I had a means of payment, and the till operator was quite happy beavering away, then he asked that question “Any plans for the day”. Now, normally, I am almost monosyllabic at the checkout, but to today, hoooboy, did I have a topic.
Now this was all said in a laughing kind of way and there was no malice in my words. But I lamented the inability of people to make plans with any degree of notice and the flexibility we need to demonstrate on a regular basis.
The till-person interjected with the occasional “yes,yes” “dreadful” “Quite agree”. Focussed on getting my trolley contents scanned as quickly as possible. This all got me wondering.
It probably took about 5 minutes to get my shopping processed. Let’s say that’s average, that means all the shop assistants probably get through 12 people per hour on an 8 hour shift, that’s 96 people. But obviously, there’s breaks so let’s call it 80. That’s the number of conversations they are having during their working day.
I have to go now, if I don’t publish this I will miss the midnight deadline and the counter will be reset to 0.
Bills Posts 