Monday 15 December 2025: Selfish gits

This post also appears on Patreon.

So it’s Monday again already and, in this household at least, we start our march towards the big day.

Friday seems such a long time ago, probably because once again I didn’t start today’s blog post until today. Therefore, I’m writing this from memory and diary notes.

The poet was working from home on Friday, so the only early start we had was for the animals. I didn’t have chance to do a lot, though, beyond the usual morning household chores, as I was off for light therapy session #6.

It was raving busy at the hospital this time. I don’t know why. On the Wednesday, there was a cubical set up in the main foyer for staff flu injections, and it’s possible there were a lot of people then going in just for their jabs. But that was Wednesday. On Friday, there was a queue of cars going into the hospital and I had lots of time to jump out of our car as we crept towards the pedestrian crossing.

There were queues inside too, at the self check-in points, but I knew there was one a bit further down, so I went to that one and had it all to myself. I nipped into the chemist to pick up some lip relief cream for which the store was one of the very few stockists, then continued on my way to my appointment.

For all my previous appointments, I’ve had the waiting area to myself. But this time there was quite the crowd, and a few minutes after I took my place, someone came out of the light therapy room. The first time I’ve seen anyone else come in or go out of the light therapy room. They took their time calling me in, but I went in and had my session and was off on my merry way again right afterwards.

When I got to the foyer again, there was another massive queue, this time at the car park payment machine. There was an older lady right at the front of the queue who couldn’t get her card to work. Instead of helping her, the person behind her accepted her offer of letting them go first while she tried at the cash paying machine.

There was a security guy there at her machine, waiting to empty the coin box. But once again, he didn’t bother to help her. By the time I got to the front of the queue, the poor woman was floundering and flustered and asking if anyone knew how these blinkin’ machines worked.

And so, of course, as soon as I was level with her I talked her through it whilst waiting my turn. She knew to put her car registration details in and she knew she could pay by either cash or card. What she hadn’t noticed was that she has to tap the button to say which she was paying by. We (another lady behind me had joined in at this point) chose ‘card’ for her, and by this time it was my turn at the other machine. I continued to help her while plugging in our own car details.

She didn’t know where to put her card, but she knew her PIN. What she didn’t know was that her card was contactless, and all she had to do was hold it against the machine. Once she did, she kept holding it there until my machine had finished. I told her she didn’t have to hold her card there once the machine had beeped. She pulled it away, and her car park fee was paid.

I was so angry that not one other person took the time to help her. Not the dozen or so people in the queue before me, not the security guy, and not any of the so-called ‘helpers’ at the nearby welcome desk. Even when I jumped in, only one other person also volunteered, and that was someone behind me in the queue. They were all too busy trying to get out without paying or accidentally going over the tariff time to the next one up. Selfish gits.

As it happened, I had to pay this time, as with all the queues I’d gone over the free 30 minutes. But I didn’t mind. It’s a really busy car park and they were having a very busy day.

When we got home, I was straight into the client edit, trying to finish at least the hard copy edit before the weekend if I could. I worked right up until tea time, but I failed, and I resolved to maybe do something at the weekend. I’d also run out of time to post Saturday’s short story to Patreon too. Perhaps I’d get around to doing that at the weekend as well…