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cw: grocery run
7 Apr 2020 11:53 amYesterday was the first really annoying grocery store experience of the pandemic!
We went at about 8 pm, which is possibly the problem. It wasn't crowded by pre-social distance standards, but there were enough people that they failed to maintain social distancing in line to check out. The people in front of us were standing between the marks on the floor, so half again as close as they should've been to the person in front of them, and while we were standing in line far enough away - which required bending the line sideways to not block an aisle! - some young idiot came and stood blocking the aisle too close to both us and the old people... even though there was only one person at the far register so the line was shorter??? The old people took five times as long to put their stuff on the conveyor belt as they should have, the way old people sometimes do, which is, I guess, okay for that reason except that they shouldn't even have been at the store outside of the old people safe hours. And then when Wax was trying to pay, some other middle aged guy who had previously been behind the tape line on the floor decided it was fine to stand less than 2 feet away from her. I have yet to see a single face mask and I was the only person with a scarf over my nose and mouth.
One is tempted to say "What is wrong with people?" but I'm sure that, like people all over the entire world, what's wrong with them is that they aren't actually scared yet, because they think there's no danger, because there haven't been any hospitalizations or deaths reported in our town. But our town is an 18k-person suburb 20 minutes from Turku, and there's still traffic going back and forth to Turku daily, and Turku has had 52 confirmed cases of the country's 2300. (Yeah, the vast majority are in the Helsinki region; the government just announced that they're tightening the travel restrictions around that province.)
We went at about 8 pm, which is possibly the problem. It wasn't crowded by pre-social distance standards, but there were enough people that they failed to maintain social distancing in line to check out. The people in front of us were standing between the marks on the floor, so half again as close as they should've been to the person in front of them, and while we were standing in line far enough away - which required bending the line sideways to not block an aisle! - some young idiot came and stood blocking the aisle too close to both us and the old people... even though there was only one person at the far register so the line was shorter??? The old people took five times as long to put their stuff on the conveyor belt as they should have, the way old people sometimes do, which is, I guess, okay for that reason except that they shouldn't even have been at the store outside of the old people safe hours. And then when Wax was trying to pay, some other middle aged guy who had previously been behind the tape line on the floor decided it was fine to stand less than 2 feet away from her. I have yet to see a single face mask and I was the only person with a scarf over my nose and mouth.
One is tempted to say "What is wrong with people?" but I'm sure that, like people all over the entire world, what's wrong with them is that they aren't actually scared yet, because they think there's no danger, because there haven't been any hospitalizations or deaths reported in our town. But our town is an 18k-person suburb 20 minutes from Turku, and there's still traffic going back and forth to Turku daily, and Turku has had 52 confirmed cases of the country's 2300. (Yeah, the vast majority are in the Helsinki region; the government just announced that they're tightening the travel restrictions around that province.)
