I went to the supermarket today in Basingstoke to attempt my first click and collect. I asked someone who was waiting how it worked and she explained that there was a big delay and the usual system had collapsed. She was peeved. I was still lost. I didn’t know what I had to do to fit into the usual system let alone the overloaded one. Once I had explained this, she explained that I should get a number and sit in the car for a while until the food turned up, which, she explained with some exasperation, could be some time.
'Oh well’ I said, ‘It's still better than trekking round the whole shop isn't it?'. She looked surprised and replied, 'Well done for finding a positive to the situation, I'm just used to it happening fast.' I laughed, 'Well, firstly I teach mindfulness, but secondly that explains why you're annoyed and I'm not - you have the expectation of this happening fast, but I have no expectation at all. So for me this can only get better - in the future it'll be a nice surprise when I don't have to wait in the car for an hour'. That made her smile a bit so I went to sit in the car and chat to my daughter and take a phone call and pass the time.
It was sunny but not too sunny. We had a chat, I took a phone call from an old friend and we listened to some music. Then our order was ready and we got out to load up the car. As I looked around I saw that there were a lot of angry and frustrated people. They were standing with arms folded and faces scowling.
It made me realise, you can wait in fury or you can wait with calm. It'll still be an hour. I expect it feels like longer if you go for the fury option. That's probably what I would have done in the past. I have years of experience of that sort of thing. As part of the mindfulness course we teach mindful queuing to help prevent this. Today it didn't occur to me to feel stressed. There was no option other than to wait so we waited, and we made the best of it.
I am guessing that they were short staffed or had some sort of hitch. The people who were there were certainly doing all that they could. We have all been there haven’t we? Surely at some point everyone has been behind a screen that wasn’t working or trying to cover for colleagues who weren’t there.
I imagine that we have all taken the brunt of someone else’s anger for something that we weren’t remotely responsible for. So now is the time to stop passing this on to other people. It is the time to accept when things are beyond our control, or their control, and to acknowledge when people are doing their best in a difficult situation.
We had been happy in the car but outside the atmosphere was tense. The staff apologised many times for the delay. I said repeatedly, 'That's fine really, it doesn't matter at all', because with everything else that's going on at the moment, today, for us, it really didn't matter. I smiled at them all and said thank you. They looked very surprised, and grateful, maybe, that one customer wasn’t cross.
That's something we can all do to help though isn't it? Services are pressed, staff are absent, ill, sheltering etc. What we can do is try to be as kind as we can to as many people as we can