I’m going to have a rant… I’m sick of shit service, I’m sick of queuing, and I’m sick of fancy coffee.
My pal Dave and I are at a services near Birmingham just off the M5 in England. Birmingham is the second most populated city in the UK after London. Dave drives an electric car, not his choice but a work thing, and we’ve just spent 20 minutes trying to get it to charge at the single high speed charging point available. This is ridiculous thing one on the list of ridiculous things, that there is one high speed charging station and the fucker is of course broken. So we had to use the slow one, another single option. This meant to get the 40 extra miles we needed into the battery we would have to be at this services for an hour or so. I could put 40 miles worth of travel into my diesel car in less that 2 minutes, but this is better because Dave’s car is saving the planet by generating the power somewhere else that this forecourt. I suspect it’s still fossil fuel, or its a device that use rare earth metals and has a higher carbon footprint than the lifespan of my dirty old vehicle. But it’s better?
Nonsense two comes within minutes, we order coffee and we are second in a line being served at a well known coffee vendor that has three visible employees as well as one in the back kitchen I would assume. I want a cup of coffee, so does Dave, but we wait for ten minutes to be asked, because in front of us is another customer that wishes to exercise their consumer right to order the most complex array of barista skilled creations known to the western world. I wondered if they were Americans but they were not, they appeared to be from the north of England. Two parents and a youngster, normal everyday people who have come to believe that their individuality and validity is linked to extrapolating to the Nth degree the convoluted commercial choices that they can now make. He maybe would have a standard commercial brand coffee at work, and a store brand at home. She maybe thinks she is a coffee snob because she buys the fancy sachets, the kid just wants something sugary. Put these people in front of an array of choices and they take an age to decide what means the most to them. It’s like this everywhere now. “Can I get the foot long with chicken, jalapenos, crusted salt, Mongolian pepper, iceberg lettuce, half sweetcorn half radish, crinkled beetroot, on sourdough that isn’t really sourdough, toasted and rested. And can I get the salted caramel cookie?”. Of course this order has the vendor, who is usually alone in the famous sandwich shop, taking 10 minutes to make what is supposed to be fast food.
When did convenience start to be so inconvenient?
I was reminded of a trip to a very popular garden centre cafe quite a few years ago where I waited 25 minutes in a queue only to have the arsehole customer in front of me decide, as they confronted the till, to take the order of the party of 10 she represented. She had been in this same queue as me for an equal amount of time.
“I’ll have the chicken dinner, mum is having the beef. Did anyone ask granny what she’s having?” Meanwhile gran is at the loo, three of the brats are running around the household section that abuts the restaurant, and a further 2 of the party have decided to finally study the enormous chalk board of choices with the huge writing that’s above the counter. I’ll say again, this lady and her party had had 25 minutes to get this shit sorted, they just didn’t, and I think I know why..
British people queue resentfully, they seethe, I seethe, and because we have to put up with each other’s seething resentment, we punish the people who come after us for the crimes of those who came before us. In a queue we get to exercise powerful resentment, let the rage out. Because we are British, and we Brits possess a sense of decorum, we would rarely actually rage. No no, we are far too buttoned-up for emotional outbursts. Instead we exercise the power we gain through being a consumer, an economic and fleeting power, but a power nonetheless. We feel better when we do this, it’s cathartic in a perverse way, and it pleases us just enough that we get over the anger we accumulated in the line.
Powerlessness drives the weak individual to grab at opportunities for power wherever they present themselves. If you are indifferent and unbothered then you are never powerless, it’s only where you wish to act or say that there is a psychological conflict between desire and an inaction. Equally so the brave are not powerless since they will act, and action is not powerlessness. Nietzsche indicates this, that love can be a resentful expression of hatred, that to express love towards those you should hate, those you truly do hate, is a way of being above them and enables the one that claims to love to feel actual superiority. A feeling of superiority towards those you hate allows you to not then act, because you don’t need to, in your mind you win…
Ok I’ve figured this all out about someone in a queue, and I’m not going to stick rigidly to it as a theory, but I do think I’m on to something even if I’m wrong about the particular person who was in front of me. I simply refuse to believe that, when given every opportunity to be efficient in our lives, for the sake of the wider group, our fellow humans, that a person wouldn’t. I believe it does not show intellectual laziness, nor stupidity, or absent mindedness. I actually believe that awkwardness, “thran” we call it in my country, is a method of gaining some sort of control, some power, under the conditions where we are, or we at least feel, stifled.
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