Whingy white woman

I spent this morning at home affairs renewing my passport – a slow, yet easy-to-do process. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my form and photos when I got there so I just asked someone and was pointed to the right place. As I was sitting in the queue to get my finger prints done a white woman with a snooty handbag and glitzy fake stone things on her sandals began bitching at the woman behind the till at the cashier line.

In that nasal accent, so prevalent in Sandton City (even though the setting of our story is in Cape Town) she screeched that she didn’t know which queue to stand in - she had obviously reached the front of the wrong one. Admittedly, there was no sign saying “cashier”, but the presence of a giant till was a bit of a giveaway, and all the other queues were marked things like “PASSPORT APPLICATIONS” and “ID APPLICATIONS” which I found self-explanatory. She obviously didn’t.

Instead of asking someone where to stand, or reading the simply-articulate signs, she decided to have a whinge at the home affairs staff, communicate her queue-frustration at anyone within hearing distance and refuse to solve her problem by asking someone where to stand. I looked around home affairs and not one other person was lost, confused or had lost the ability to ask a question along the lines of “where should I go?”.

This Chardonnay-swigging, Woollies-omnivore tart was INCENSED that the queues and arrows were not displayed in, on her terms, a satisfactory manner.

Home affairs sucks. It is a shitty horrible place to be. It is drab, dirty and depressing and a mission. No one wants to be there, particularly on a Saturday morning. And it is like that all the time. Eventually I got to the point where I wanted to ring her pearled (not in the fun way) neck to stop her squeaky rantings which, as she got more frantic, were at a perilous frequency that made the dogs in the Cape Town city bowl begin barking. In fact I think some of the windows in Barrack Street were in danger.

Sit and deal with it! AND SHUT UP!