Yesterday a member of staff in Sainbury’s asked me to move back and stand behind a sign I had missed.
“What?”
“You need to move back and stand behind the sign.”
“Why?”
“Social distancing.”
“What?”
“You need to be 2 metres apart from the person in front of you.”
“I am two metres apart from the person in front of me.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes I am. Look.”
“That’s not 2 metres.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
Yes it is. Go and get a tape measure. See for yourself.”
“You need to stand behind the sign sir.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do.”
“No. I don’t. Don’t be so stupid.”
She stared at me, for a few seconds. I imagined her wishing for some alarm button she could press that would initiate my sterilised extraction by some hybrid cleaning/security team.
Nothing happened. Instead she turned her attention to the last person in the queue who was standing about 1.8m away from the person in front of him. She asked him to move back. He just walked off and went to pay at the kiosk.
During our face off she had been standing about a metre apart from the people paying at the self checkouts. Now she made a show of trying to stand 2 metres away from everyone, including herself, which seemed especially impossible without levitation, especially when the man with the trolley full of whiskey ached his way passed.
Before I could move to the tills she came to wipe down the keypad and screen of the self check out I was aiming for. Not very well I might add. Punishment perhaps. I felt like asking for a different member of staff, citing her continued exposure and close proximity to customers throughout the day as making her the primary health hazard in the store. Deciding instead to keep it as an ace up my sleeve incase she tries to pull that stunt again I carried my incensed temper in tightly bound utterances of disregard, muttered to the gods of rationality and reason. Exercising good sense and taking care is one thing, the concretisation of protocols and the thoughtless adherence to the rules introduced to enforce them will claim the souls of tens of thousands before this episode it through I thought.
Thank God for the measured sense of the staff in places like Lidls and Morrisons, which is not a sentence I would have ever imagined uttering before all this. What shame I feel for my judgement is mitigated by a new found gratitude. The universe remains in balance a while longer then it seems, but i wonder how long for.
