Lessons in patience

Many places in Israel are not exactly known for their customer service.  The stereotype is that you are just expected to "deal with it" and that complaints or requests are met with the attitude of "what? It's not my problem, what do you want me to do about it?" (picture someone doing that lip-curl expression of "meh" along with a shrug and arms up, palms open. This is the classic, accompanying, body language).  Although I have to admit that I don't encounter this super often, and customer service is just as hit and miss all over the world in my opinion. But, regardless of where you are, it is always a nice surprise when a place that you don't expect it from, does something really nice.

The other day we were grocery shopping at our neighborhood store.  The lines are always super slow, and guessing which line to take becomes very similar to the guess the quick line at the border.  The one you choose is always the slowest.  Always.  Add to this that speed and efficiency are not required or expected in a cashier (often the young ones will be continuously texting or browsing the internet while checking you through).  But on this particular day we managed to hit the mother of all slow lines.  We must have watched 3 people go through in every other line while we had all of our stuff on the belt.  Turns out, it's the training line -so fine, everyone has to learn, no big deal.  Then the person ahead of us could have qualified for an extreme couponing show...
We finally made it through, everything rang through without a problem, paid with credit card (there is no debit in Israel!) no problem, then....problem.  The new cashier called in a bunch of people who all tried to do..something.  At this point, having no Hebrew is super frustrating.  No one was talking to us so we had no idea what was going on - and being the passive Canadians that we are, we just sort of waited for them to tell us :).

Anyone who knows us knows that between Zach and I, Zach is the patient one.  Like, many magnitudes more patient.  So he was all cool and chill, and I was like, "What are they doing?! What could possibly be wrong?  Why are we still stuck here.." and so after about 10 min of just standing around (with much eye-contact making and sighing), I just grabbed the grocery bags and tried to leave, figuring that if we were part of the problem they would have told us already...and it wouldn't be unheard of for them to just be working on something and not care whether it was weird that we were standing there looking confused.  So... then we quickly found out that we couldn't leave (I do know that word!  Rega!Rega!Rega! is quite common and means, wait!)  Poor Zach.  I get fidgety sometimes.  I'm working on it, hah.

They quickly learned that we didn't understand what was going on ..the manager goes to the rest of the crew there, "ohhh, Angleet!" (which means "English") and they all gave knowing nods, and at that point I think they just said we had to wait (none of them seemed to speak English much).  Anyway, it all got sorted out in the end, thankfully, turns out the receipt printer was broken and we had to sign the receipt before we could leave.  So this felt like it took at least 20  minutes, but it was probably only 15 or so.  We take our bags and leave, and then the manager runs after us and I'm thinking, oh man, what else could possibly go wrong!  And he indicates that we could take a giant bouquet of flowers from the flower stand at the exit!  Yay!  I was so touched - it was so unexpected.  Haha, flowers make everything better.  So a long winded story, but they made my day :)  I would wait in the longest line everyday if I ended up with free flowers at the end :)