There are things normal people can manage during the day which I can no longer humanly tolerate. Going to the supermarket is one of them, and embarking on a pilgrimage to the bank is another. Praise the universe, the former can now be done at the dead of night, but as for the other, the unabating torment continues.
A couple of weeks ago I had to go to the bank in person instead of happily interacting with a machine the way I usually do. Since everyone only sees fit to physically accept and cash cheques Cinderella-like till midday (because apparently all of us are gainfully unemployed and have two spare hours to spend at the bank before lunch), I was only able to go to the bank on Saturday. I arose nice and early to get there before the morning rush, but alas, I was wrong and how wrong I was.
So, I get to the bank; the queue is snaking outside the front door. I cannot see inside and a policeman is huffing and puffing between me and the glass door. He’s looking as fed up as I feel and I’m pretty sure that he’s about to tell us all to “Moove beck, plijs”.
It’s a 15-minute wait just to get inside but I am determined; I have left the comfort of my pillow palace for this and I will not be deterred. I am finally inside, ready and willing to queue and then, it happens. I realise that there is no queue, but a cluster of people lazily chatting to each other while simultaneously telling each other how busy they are with the importance of Merkel speaking about the European economy to Macron.
Maybe if we start pretending to be efficient, we’ll actually get there, eventually
I am already fed up and profoundly annoyed, so I shift my body to the middle of the aisle; I may not be able to do anything about the disaster in front of me but I will be damned if I’m going to allow the ridiculousness to continue behind me too. As usual, I miscalculated the enemy’s cunning.
As I’m celebrating my small victory, feeling like Gandalf when he bellows “You shall not pass”, I get pushed to one side by a robust lady who stands right next to me and proceeds to ask if I’m in front of her. I think at this point I just made the sound of a strangled chicken. I literally couldn’t believe my eyes or ears. I was standing in front of her, I was there when she came in, I didn’t fall out of the sky, where else could I have been but squarely in front of her?
She then just stood next to me like we were about to enter into wedded bliss in front of the bank cashier. And this was just the beginning. One after each other, just like clockwork, people would come in, ask who was in front of them and just stand in a crowd, as if the ropes on each side of the aisle were just there for decoration.
Inevitably, an argument eventually broke out because two people couldn’t remember which one of them came in first and everyone decided to pitch in their two cents. I felt like I was in Dante’s seventh circle of hell and just wanted to set the entire room on fire.
All of this could have been avoided if they had just queued like citizens of every single civilised country in the world. What should have taken 15 minutes ended up being a two-hour odyssey complete with a 10-headed monster called Doris who loudly insisted on talking about some fungus her second cousin twice removed had after some mysterious visit to the hospital. I went home tired, spent and defeated. I was no match for Doris.
If anyone is out there and able to hear my plea, please, please, please either extend your working hours to match everyone else’s or just give your security guard something to do and make sure that an orderly queue is kept so that people don’t feel like they’re part of the crowd following Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. Maybe if we start pretending to be efficient, we’ll actually get there, eventually.