A few weeks ago I popped into a local supermarket to do a typical supplies grab. This would usually include a trip down the meat aisle (which I can now, once again, go down first, because the arrows stuck to the floor prohibiting that have now been removed), but the aisle was empty. Completely empty. My immediate thought was “here we go again!” I recalled visions during the start of the “pandemic” when aisles would be laid bare and a crisis was declared due to a loo roll shortage; that was just before Easter 2020, I know this because the Easter egg aisle was fully stocked.
When I got home I did a quick search online for news of food shortages and indeed was informed of a lack of HGV drivers, seemingly because of Brexit. This was odd because “Brexit”, to me at least, happened months ago (I don’t keep abreast of the news to I’m generally oblivious to such goings on), so why was this posing an issue now?
A couple of days after this empty shelves incident I was doing work for a client who randomly remarked about the empty shelves in the very same supermarket, and before I could interrupt with “I know, I was there too, and saw it also” he proceeded to describe the vision as if I was new on the scene. It then transpired, as his tale came to a close, that he’d enquired in the shop as to why the shelves were empty, and been told “they were simply doing a ‘deep clean’, seemingly something they routinely do, and the stock in that aisle had been completely removed to facilitate that.” This explanation actually made more sense than the one I had found online, (although I’d never heard of such a thing being carried out, at least during opening hours) because of how empty the shelves were; normally during panic buying season the shelves are left with a scattering of the more expensive items, or ones with damaged packaging. What didn’t quite make sense though was my initial suspicion had been confirmed when I visited a second shop immediately after and discovered a lack of similar products there also… but alas perhaps they had simply sold out due to the first shop doing that deep clean malarkey.
Skip ahead to this week and we are once again experiencing fuel shortages. For this there appears to be no other explanation than “fuel shortages were reported in the news and then people went out and panic-bought fuel, thus causing a shortage.”
One can’t help think of the word “morons” in all of this, a term that has featured quite a lot in my inner monologue during the past 18 months. Not that I myself am not immune from such labelling.
The scenes outside various petrol stations I passed yesterday, of queues off the garage forecourts reminded me of the first “fuel crisis” I experienced. It would have been shortly after 9/11 or around the time of the (second) Iraq war; I know this because I remember hearing the news of impending fuel shortages due to supposed “unrest” in those fuel-supplying regions, and I promptly went out that same evening as part of a convoy of two with my dad to fill up our cars; I needed to have enough petrol in my car to get me to college that week, and he needed to be able to get to work. I still have a memory of that scene outside the petrol station; the queue of cars all waiting for their fuel. I find being in a queue of traffic to be amusing these days because my perception has changed from seeing everyone else causing the very queue “I’m in” to “we’re all causing this queue, myself included.”
My thought of “morons” had me thinking what other things people believe from what they hear on the news… alas, we’re all morons really. The ‘scary’ part is, our so-called “leaders” aren’t immune from this either and I’ve been thinking recently that what makes people of the general population develop this tendency affects everyone to a certain degree (perhaps some are simply more resilient than others, or manage to distance themselves from such things); it could be excessive smart-phone use/screen time along with electro-magnetic radiation, poor diet, nutrient-deficient/chemically-rich food, to stuff in the water (or air). Hell, it could even be chem-trails.
I was doing work for a client recently who likes to criticise others, typically the younger generations. We got talking about how youngsters don’t play outside like they used to, and she spoke of how they only know how to communicate through their phones. This client perceives and presents herself as something of a technophobe, but the irony is she uses more gadgetry than me*; laptop, smartphone and Amazon echo all whirring away – she wasn’t always this way but I could see how all this stuff had crept into her life, even if she couldn’t see it.
*okay, maybe not more than me, even if I don’t have a smartphone in regular use and see the folly that is Alexa, I still have various gadgets.
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