Walk along the sides please...

Had to go to Coventry on Friday on a call-out, its a two hour drive and the job took me a couple of hours to complete.

Got back on the motorway and realised that I hadn't had a cup of coffee all day, a shocking state of affairs, so pulled into a motorway service station for my takeaway caffeine fix, I actually found a parking space right in front of the main door too, which was nice as it had just started raining.

And then I saw them...

Old people.

Old people alighting from a bus, one at a time, on shaky legs, shivering down the steps like a new born foal until they could grab the zimmer frame that the carers were holding out.

And worse.

There were only a few of them left on the bus.

Which meant...

The rest of them were already on their way in towards the service station shop.

Bollacks.

Managed to squeeze past several of them on the short dash to the door but still got stuck in the bottleneck to get into the building and had to join in their shuffle where you move one foot along the floor so that it takes up a position just a few inches in front of the other foot, then repeat with the second foot, and so on and so on.

It took five minutes to get through the door, five minutes in the rain behind two old blokes wearing those "windcheaters" that only old men buy, and baseball caps - only teenage boys and ancient men wear baseball caps these days, and this pair had very nice tartan pattern baseball caps on, christ knows where you buy tartan pattern baseball caps, Scotland probably.

And then when I was finally in the shop I couldn't get around thes two old codgers, I went left, they went left, I went right they went right, it was like they had rear view cctv built into their spectacles, they read every one of my movements and blocked me in an instant, I had to bite my tongue to stop myself shouting out "walk to the bloody side of the shop you stupid old bastards".

I should have known better of course, the middle of the afternoon is no time to be entering a motorway service station. Its just two hours after the touring old bastards have had their lunchstop and now they need a piss break and another cup of tea to get them through the afternoon, the queue outside the ladies toilet was stretching back so far in the rain that they were nearly standing on the motorway itself.

When I made it to the caffe culture automated caffeine machine my heart sunk for there at the button pressing light flashing self service front end were two old buggers trying to work out how to extract a hot chocolate drink from the machine, ten minutes I waited behind them listening to endless explanations to the one pressing the buttons from the other who was equally clueless, ending in a three minute search for the chocolate powder to sprinkle on top.

All of which is why I want to retire early from my job, I don't want to be consigned to a coach tour of the UK's service stations when I grow old, I want to be able to drive myself, stop when I want to stop, not stop when a coach driver says I have to piss, I want to retire now and I want to slow down gracefully to the speed of a snail and hold up all of the other working people who are having to rush through their lives at the speed of sound.

I'm jealous of these old people, why can't my life be so slow ?