Walking down the high street, while doing my lunch time shopping, I realized something. Standing in a queue at a store I looked at the person working there and in a way admired them.

The thought that every single day I come to work, I would have exactly the same routine ahead of me. Same mundane tasks repeated over and over again. Maybe you do get a bit of variation, but a day of cleaning, followed by a day of shelf stacking, followed by a day of cashier work, and then back to cleaning, still doesn’t sound too appealing, if it even works this way.

Admittedly the closest I have ever came to such work was helping at my parents music store when I was a kid. I honestly disliked those days - dusting shelves and stacking cds and casettes. Mostly cleaning this and cleaning that, and you didn’t even get to play your music as due to my taste it might scare away the customers (and admittedly it probably would have).

Later on in life during a Christmas visit to England, just before I moved permanently, I have worked at some kind of post sorting, magazine packing warehouse. In many ways it was a sad experience, not because of the manual labour, but more due to the painful lack of efficiency and organisation. I guess I am the kind of person who cannot look at an obviously inefficient process and not even try to better it.

The packaging process involved the following steps: preparing the envelope, putting the magazine inside, inserting some other papers, lacking the envelope, and finally placing the address sticker. I was in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and the company was massively behind, which was how me and my sister got the job along side quite a few other temps. Even with all the extra hands they still had over 12 hour shifts, and gave extra hours to any temp that would take it.

Already during the first half a day me and my sister have quickly realized that considering we were grouped into 5 people tables, we could process the magazines a lot quicker if one person did only one action rather than try to do all the steps from start to finish. A the end of the day our table processed a lot more and a lot quicker than some of he other ones.

What surprised us though, was that instead of this being noticed we were not asked to come back after the third day. What it came down to was that the supervisors had people sign their name when they took batches of address stickers. Considering neither me nor my sister did the stickers at our table, not for most of the day at least, we were not considered efficient enough!

I could understand the motivation for everyone doing every step - it probably would ease the monotony of the work. When you’re just sliding magazines into the envelopes it does verge on a state of hypnotic automation. However we were not full time employees, we were temps to supposedly clear out the backlog of deliveries as quickly as possible.

That was just one example of their disorganisation, just to mention one more, one of the days we spent over four hours doing nothing - just sitting at empty tables, because they were waiting for the address stickers to arrive. Not that we might have been doing everything up to the point of stickers - racks of envelopes and magazines were sitting there and just waiting.

When I was a kid I used to enjoy winter quite a lot. I remember snow sometimes started to fall even as early as late November. We used to go to school, have snowball fights in the school’s courtyard during breaks and go sledging or creating snowmen in the afternoons. Depending on the temperature we sometimes were even able to use the lake as a free skating rink (whether we had skates or not…).

You might be starting to get the picture.

The only time in primary school we got a day off in the winter was because only 3 or 5 (can’t remember exactly) kids showed up, with the rest being absent due to some flu outbreak.

Imagine then my bewilderment when during my first winter in England we had a whole day of snow, which resulted in a almost national day off for school kids. Quite strange if you ask me. Although considering snow is such a rare occurrence, especially in the south, well maybe the kids do deserve a couple of hours extra to enjoy real winter weather.

However it is not the schools or kids that are the big shock.

Maybe the snowfall at the beginning of the week was the worst in the last 18 years, however I can quite well recall two years ago the country had a small panic attack as well. It seems like Britain is living in some sort of denial.

The winters are mild and winter tires seem to be a novel concept to English people. Yet, just because there is no snow, it does not mean you can be excused for not being prepared for bad weather.

We had snow on Monday, nice big flakes nearly all day. Admittedly it did pile up a little bit. However it looked nowhere near the disaster it turned into… From my perspective it was just a bit of snow, not much more than we would see in my home country on a very generic snowy winter day.

Not in Britain though… The buses stopped, trains ceased to function, London underground was paralysed. The brave crusaders on the motorway ended up in numerous collisions, or if they were lucky enough snailed their way to work. The panic, the disorganisation, people frantically callying their workplaces. This in turn meant that around ninish in the morining mobile networks got slightly overloaded, and train websites like nationalrail.co.uk just died due to the ‘unforseen’ spike in traffic.

My own workplace ended up in slight chaos. Most people worked from home. The few that came were confronted with the lack of keys, as it just so happened that all keyholders got delayed or stranded by the weather. Just as I was going to leave for work I got a call telling me about the key situation which was the only reason I ended up working from home.

It is so shocking to see a country that sets an example on how to deal with really big catastrophes like the London bombings, fall apart due to a little bit of snow. When those happened a lot of people in countries like mine were shocked, positively mind you, at how quickly and swiftly the order was restored, the situation dealt with and life was back to normal.

It isn’t a fair comparison but it does remind me of an elephant scared of a mouse when it comes to the winter issue. The weather is changing, even if we are not getting daily snow, frost does seem to come and go. The arguments seem to be that the measures needed for situations like this are not worth the cost when it happens every 18 years. But there s fault in such thinking, as firstly you cannot forsee if the next event like this will happen the following year or in the next decade. Secondly maybe it doesn’t get as extreme as this, but this things do seem to be happening even if it is with less severity.