“This area is for waiting customers only. You will have to wait over there.” In a service office, a man in a gray uniform gestures away from a bench. A pregnant woman in a pale striped dress gets up, holding a small ticket.
She explains that she has her queue ticket and is next in line. “I just need to sit for a moment.” He keeps speaking to her and raises a hand as she tries to show it to him. A woman in a dark suit steps forward. “Excuse me, what’s going on here?” The clip ends with the pregnant customer still standing beside the seat.
The story continues:
The supervisor looked at the ticket, then at the number on the screen. They matched.
“We’ve just called you,” she said. “Please sit. I’ll bring the form over.”
The customer lowered herself onto the bench. Her name was Laura. She’d come to update an address after moving into a new flat. It should have been a simple errand. She’d brought the documents in a folder, arranged in the order listed on the website, and even carried a spare pen.
What she hadn’t planned for was needing to argue that a waiting bench was somewhere she could wait.
The employee read the ticket and frowned at himself. He’d assumed she was accompanying somebody else. “I should have checked that before asking you to move. I’m sorry.”
Laura nodded. “Can I finish the form sitting here?”
“Of course.”
He brought a clipboard. There was a tiny plastic flower taped to its top edge, left over from some office celebration. Laura found herself smiling at it. She had spent the morning choosing paint colors for the baby’s room and changing her mind every ten minutes. The flower was almost exactly the shade of yellow she liked.
While the supervisor checked the documents, Laura called her partner. “I’ve decided. Yellow.”
He asked if that meant the pale yellow or the yellow she said looked like mustard.
“The little flower on the clipboard yellow.”
There was a pause. “I’m going to need a photograph.”
The employee offered to hold the clipboard where the light was better. The picture they took included his hand, the flower, and the corner of the completed address form. It was a strangely cheerful souvenir of an unpleasant ten minutes.
Months later, Laura returned with the baby to collect another document. The same employee was working. He recognized her and pointed out the available seats before asking what she needed.
She showed him a photograph of the nursery. The walls were yellow. On the shelf was a framed print of the clipboard flower, cropped so nobody would guess where it came from.
“My partner insisted on keeping it,” she said. “First decision we actually agreed on.”
The employee laughed. Then her number appeared on the screen. This time he waited while she gathered the baby and her folder, and walked beside her to the desk at a pace she could comfortably manage.
