Can’t I just do that right now? The perils of on-the-spot decision making

My lovely Lady has been out and about in the City for the last couple of weeks, immersing herself in how things work and meeting as many people as possible. It’s been an interesting adventure that is recounted to me each evening on the couch or over some noodles at a restaurant.
The current learning event of the week (read “frustration of the week”) is that there doesn’t seem to be much of sense of the impromptu. Lady, bless her cotton-socks, has high standards from her background in five-star hotels and expects the same when presented with a service opportunity. However, it’s not all been going to plan recently, nothing that she tries to do seems possible without extensive forward planning.


A few examples range from recruitment agencies that won’t even take five minutes to talk to you unless you have an appointment in advance, sewing classes that you can’t put your name down for unless you’ve called ahead, but get this, you can buy cinema tickets from the box office but all the seats (except the rubbish ones at the side and the front three rows) have all been booked in advance!
This was demonstrated to us today on a wet weekend as we searched on line through five different cinemas for a pair of seats that weren’t three-meters-from-the-screen neck-breakers; it’s almost impossible to get impromptu seats here, so book early. However, what stuns us is that you still need to queue up at the box-office with your on-line print-out to get hold of the paper tickets anyway. Pointless. For somewhere so technologically advanced, this seems utterly backwards.


Needless to say, Lady’s pretty ticked about all this inability to react on the spot and the dearth of spontaneity unless there is a check-list of spontaneous responses taped beneath the counter, but has learned an important lesson; always call ahead to make sure that the journey you’re about to make will lead to the outcome you’re seeking. After all, it’s way too hot for a stroll down Orchard Road only to have to stroll all the way back again with no result.

Shovel