Time's A-Wasting

If dozens of country songs are to be believed, time is a precious thing. Many a lyric has been written about the theme that once a moment has passed you can never get it back again and it doesn't matter how much money you have, you can never buy more time. Even if you aren't a fan of country music, there is no denying that they do appear to have a pretty firm grip on Newton's theory of linear time. As humans, it does seem that few things annoy us more than wasted time, especially when it is personal free time. No one cares if a meeting runs long, because we're at work when it started and we'll still be at work when it ends. The only person losing out on that deal is the company payroll manager. However, losing that time after work is what causes people to flip out when they watch a bad movie because that is two hours of their life they will never get back. (Considering how most people choose to spend their free time I don't know what they are so worried about, but that is another topic for another day.) That is why it almost always stuns me when I see people wasting tons of time in an effort to waste as little energy as possible.

I was sitting in the parking lot of a supermarket today when a woman rolled a cart full of groceries out to the car next to me. After she loaded her car she began to have the internal debate of what to do with her now-empty cart. Polite society demands you return to the cart to the store or the nearest collection bin that some locations provide. That would be the right thing to do. However, lazy people would tell you just to roll it to the space in front of your car, make sure it isn't moving, then get the hell out of there before a gust of wind comes along and causes it to start rolling, where it will ultimately come to rest after scraping another car's bumper or denting their door. (Personally I leave the carts in the store, which is why I love the reusable fabric bags. Not only do their handles last long enough to make it across the parking lot when compared to the plastic bag's which nearly break going from the register to the cart, but thanks to the wider handles I can carry about 8 at a time.) Judging by the way this woman was looking around the parking lot to see who might catch her, I'm pretty sure that if I wasn't already sitting in my truck I would have come out to find the cart resting against the door.

Lucky for her, a rare third option presented itself because that was the exact moment the kid came out of the store to round up the carts the lazy people had left at various spots all over the parking lot. The only problem for her was that he started a couple rows over and didn't appear to be moving at a great clip (at least he was getting paid for his time)- he would collect one cart, thinking about it and then meandering over to where another cart was waiting for him.. As a result she stood there for a couple minutes, patiently waiting until he got close enough that she could roll her cart over to be added to his lengthy train. It is at this point I should mention I had lucked out and gotten the first spot in the row closest to the store, which meant this woman next to me was (at most) 30 feet from the entrance to the store where they kept these carts. By my calculations she could have walked back into the store, returned her cart, walked back to her car, gotten in and driven away at least twice in the same amount of time. Instead she stood there and waited, saving herself the burden of walking but wasting time.

Look, I'm all for the path of least resistance - after all, I'm a guy who will wait in line to drop my mail into the drive-through mailbox instead of getting out to walk across a small parking lot. But even by my standards this seemed like a terrible trade-off. To me it is all about figuring out which route would be faster and clearly this woman had picked incorrectly. Even if her calendar was wide-open for the rest of the afternoon you would think she would prefer to spend it doing anything else besides standing around a supermarket parking lot and if she actually had someplace to be this was not a good way to make sure she got there on-time. I know a minute or two doesn't seem like much, but I got the distinct impression this was not the first time this woman traded time in the name of doing a little less work today. That kind of stuff adds up quickly. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn she is the kind of person who is always running a few minutes behind schedule. At least we can be confident that she is full of energy to attack her task once she reaches her destinations... whenever that may be.