Do you know what’s good about a building falling down on a couple hundred people? Nothing. There is nothing good about a building collapsing and crushing the life out of people.
But Joe Biden, being the eternal optimist he is, tried to find a silver lining. At a meeting last week in Florida to talk about the collapse of the Surfside Condominiums, Biden halted the meeting by saying, “You know what’s good about this?”
He then rambled on in his mind-half-empty…oops…I mean glass-half-full…sort of way about things I’m sure none of the families of the squished victims care one lick about.
But it got me to thinking. Is there a good thing about COVID? It turns out there is.
There are three things for certain. Death and taxes are the two that come to mind for most people. But there’s a third. At least for me there is. The third thing I know for certain is that I will always, without fail, select the checkout line that moves the slowest.
Every. Single. Time.
Oh sure, when a new lane opens, the person manning (or should I say “personing”) the register tries to herd someone close to the front of the line to the newly-opened register. But, invariably, some asshole 10 carts back jumps ahead of me and everyone else standing patiently in line.
Some people I can understand. If I see someone rush to the front of the line clutching an industrial-sized bottle of Imodium and a shitload (sorry, I couldn’t resist) of toilet paper, I’m happy to let them go first. They undoubtedly need to get home sooner than I do. But if you’re just buying snacks, beer and party supplies, then wait your damn turn Skippy.
OK. Back to COVID…
When stores in my area, probably stores everywhere, implemented social distancing rules, they queued everyone up in a single line that fed all the registers. It was a true first-come-first-served method of herding people through the checkout process.
I didn’t like it at first. But that was because they kept changing where the line formed. I’d gleefully push my cart to where the line formed last week thinking I was next to go. Then I’d find out that the line was actually in a different aisle and snaked all the way to the back of the store. Even worse, as I maneuvered my cart to the real end of the line, five more people got ahead of me.
But, once they pasted dots on the floor and the position of the line became semi-permanent, I realized that the single-line method was the fairest solution. Especially for a couldn’t-choose-a-fast-lane-if-my-life-depended-on-it person like me.
Now, the social distancing restrictions are disappearing. I found yesterday that the single-line system has disappeared as well. Sadly, the one good thing about COVID, the only thing that was salvageable from “the new normal”, has gone by the wayside.
The good news, from a glass-half-full perspective, is that I won’t have to wait long for the more efficient check out queue to come back. I predict that with the advent of Delta, Lambda and the coming soon OMG-we’re-all-going-to-die Omicron, Sigma and Upsilon variants, state and local governments will put the mandates and restrictions back in place before the end of the summer.
Well, they’ll try to anyway. Americans are wising up and seeing that the world didn’t end when Texas and Florida dropped all their restrictions months ago. More and more people are realizing that the government and Big Media overreacted to COVID and created an artificial crisis by misrepresenting the danger of the disease. People are starting to understand that causing the failure of tens of thousands of businesses and the loss of financial security for millions of people was unnecessary and caused much more harm than good.
I say that regardless of how many variants we’re told to be afraid of pop up, it’s time to stop, once and for all, these silly COVID restrictions.
Because nothing good will ever come from them.
