Supermarket Mission Creep

How I planned this morning:

05:00: get up.
06:00: go to supermarket to get some food.
06:45: get back home to do other stuff.

Mission-elapsed time: 45 minutes.

What actually happened:

05:00: get up.
06:00: go to supermarket to get some food.
06:15: realise I don’t have my card and have to wait until 8am to be able to get it.
06:45: go back home and charge scooter.
08:30: go back to supermarket in the rain.
08:35: join queue of 3 people at the information desk (an old lady is doing something at the desk which I quickly realise is taking forever…at this point I’m not surprised because whenever I have to do stuff outside of early morning or late evening, this always seems to happen).
09:00: lady in front of me bails out as she just wanted to change money into a £1 coin— the old lady is still faffing about at the information desk…
09:10: finally make it to front of queue, with a queue of ten…TEN people behind me (there’s only one information desk open because it’s never normally busy of course!). Woman at desk puts out intercom message to checkout supervisor to come look through the bank cards for me, whilst I wait to the side so she can serve the other people.
09:30: woman at desk re-assures me that the guy is still going through them… there’s just a lot of them apparently. I start creating a second bank account with Starling Bank on my phone (since Monzo won’t let me have a second one 🤔). I notice that the information desk queue is now non-recoverable and is still snaking down the shop because of that one initial old lady 🤦‍♂️. Overhear guy on phone desperately explaining about the ‘fucking long queue’ to person on other end.
09:40: supervisor guy finally comes back and has my card.
09:41: I go round supermarket doing the exact same shop I did three-and-a-half hours earlier, stressfully this time because there’s people everywhere. On way out I realise I’ve been in there for so long that there’s now a huge queue of deeply-masochistic people snaking through the car park to get in. Also realise I hate people.
10:00: back!

Mission-elapsed time: 4 hours (not counting the wasted trip also on Saturday!!).

Mitigation measures enacted:

• Second bank account created so that in future I can just switch temporarily to the backup account and order a replacement for the lost card.

👍

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You see how…with ADHD (combined with the various rules and rigid systems of the modern world), really small mistakes can become extremely costly to fix (in terms of time, if not money)? And through the course of correcting one mistake, you’re often messing up something else— e.g. forgetting an important appointment— so that having too many demands can lead to a feeling of constantly trying to catch up amidst endless recriminations.

I say it’s ADHD-related, because it’s a ‘working memory’ issue:

—Because it’s so easy to forget things in the moment, checklists are necessary (physical and mental ones).
—Working memory failure led to me forgetting that I’d inserted the bank card instead of doing contactless payment…in the time it took me to enter my pin number and the machine to confirm the payment!! (This never happened to me before starting to use the contactless method).

“An individual with ongoing ADHD will not (by definition) be able to complete pilot training.  Medication used for this disorder is normally disqualifying.”
☹️
Good!

🌪