No Secrets Please. We Are Australians

Australians are a bunch of chatty lot. They just love to talk. When they start to talk, all other things are subordinated in importance. They can talk, as we sometimes like to infer, till kingdom comes.

And so, if you are in the queue for some services, don't count your luck yet when there are only three people in front of you. You know, Australians are efficient in their service delivery. They may take only five minutes to dispense the required service to you. Then, a great unique Australian only behaviour takes over. The customer and the service provider start to talk. And they talk for another fifteen minutes. Talk about what? It usually does not look about the service.

I see this happening everywhere. The only times when this does not happen is when one or all of the following is/are true:

1. Either the customer or the service provider is young-ish.
2. At risk of being labeled a sexist, either the customer or the service provider is a male.

So last week I took Julian to an after hour clinic for a consultation. He had flu. And he had a school camp coming up in two days. We thought, just to be safe, we had better get his flu under control or he might just have to miss the camp. Julian would probably cry if he had to skip the camp. He had been eagerly waiting for it for sometime.

At the clinic, there were only, yes only, three other patients ahead of us. Another patient must have been with the doctor when we checked in. This patient did not come out until forty minutes later. So I started estimating it would take us another one half hours to reach the doctor. The next one took fifteen minutes. Then two more, teenagers, each spent five minutes. Finally I used five minutes to get it over.

And then, at the chemist shop, I bumped into another typical chatty fellow in front of me. She took twenty minutes, yes, to buy her medicine. Fifteen of those minutes were spent talking after she got the medicine, all about the medicine I think. I took just three minutes to get mine.

What do Australians talk about? If there was that much to talk about, you would seriously need to wonder.

No secrets please. We are Australians.