How valuable is your time?

This is a photo of my amazing children building houses out of mud outside our house. But they really aren't who this story is about, although they were present.

I had forgotten to pay rent this month and so since Monday was a holiday I had to pay rent on the 2nd. There are several things wrong with this senario and the main one is that you should never go to the bank at the beginning or end of the month anyway but especially not after or right before a holdiay! I had to go though.

I got to the bank at 9:15 and it opens at 9. I withdrew the money from the atm and walked inside (with both girls in tow). I grabbed a number (little plastic cards with the number painted on) from the security guard with a fully automatic weapon. And from there I took my seat (we had to search for one, and the only one available was right in front of this huge fan that blew like they were performing wind tunnel tests. It kept making this strange noise and I realized it kept sucking Marcela's hair up into it.) I filled out my deposit form and looked at my number 75 and up at the number they were on 25! You do the math 50 people ahead of me. But this shouldn't take so long because there were 6 tellers helping people right?!?!?! HA!!!!!!!!!!!!

I texted Reg at some point, half an hour of waiting and only 9 numbers had been called. So I figure I'm looking at around 2.5 hours! The numbers crawled by and I thought I would scream. Harmony fell asleep which was a huge blessing from God and Marcela had her backpack full of books and so she "read" to me (no she can't really read yet.) At some point in the morning the guard with the fully automatic weapon walked through and tapped on the counter where the tellers were and said something laughingly to the tellers and went back to the door and the numbers started flying! So I don't know what he said, maybe he ran out of numbers and threatened to shoot them if they didn't get a move on it or who knows.

So they finally get to my number 75 and this old woman came up too also with a 75 only mine was black and hers was red. The teller proceeded to tell her (in visayan so I'm just guessing but they use English numbers so I got the jist of it) that they were on black now and that they had to get all the way back to 0 and then start over with the red ones! I felt really bad for her but there was no way that I was going to let her go since I had both kids, cooking class later on in the day and had been sitting in that seat for over 2 hours and my behind was quite numb. So that poor old lady had to sit for 100 numbers and my 50 took over 2 hours she must have been there all day.

I just kept thinking about how things like this would never fly in the US because people's time is too valuable and no one would think of making you wait this long. Oh well, maybe next month we'll pay 2 months and I'll only have to go through it once every other month. The other thing is that I'm thinking about paying in the middle of the month. We'll see how that goes.