Tuesday – Craft Room Rage

Today I taught them Winter Trees; most seemed to find it all a lot less stressful than the previous session, which in turn makes it all less stressful for me.

I am currently running three groups; 1pm, 2:30pm and 4pm. I usually let the first group in at about 10 minutes to 1, give or take. While I’m setting up, they congregate outside, forming an orderly queue, and it’s more or less the same people every time; a full group of 20. When I open the door, they file in, in an orderly, civilised fashion, taking their seats, and taping their watercolour paper down to the boards with a contented, enthusiastic air. Because of this efficient civility, we’re up and running very quickly… the 1pm group are a pleasure to work with. Then there’s the 2:30pm group….

The second group start congregating outside in the corridor at any time from around 2pm onwards, while the first group are still in session. Today, as usual, I opened the door to them at a few minutes before half-past. It’s like a stampede; frantically, they pile in. If they could climb over each other, to try and bag the seat that they consider ‘there’s’, they would. In the few minutes of madness, some will grab the seats that they wish, and some will settle for second best… others will create a scene…

Today, a couple of people ended up in different seats. This caused a general unhappiess amongst those few who didn’t manage to get to the front of the queue. As I’ve stated many times before; I refuse to get involved in ‘Chair Politics’. Seats do not have people’s names on them, and the general rule of thumb is that it is first-come-first served, so I didn’t know what the problem was. One gentleman, to the annoyance of one irate lady, had taken a different seat and flatly refused to move. The lady pointed out that this was HER chair – she sat in the seat EVERY DAY. the gentleman wasn’t having it, though; he pointed across to someone else, who was sitting in the chair that he’d sat in every day since it began. But then, when everyone had found a seat, there were still three people standing, and one chap, who was visibly angry, turned on me, demanding to know why he hadn’t got a place, considering the fact that he’d BOOKED a place by putting his name down on the sheet at the craft display on the first sea-day. I explained, as I’ve explained to them several times before, that the list of names taken at the display was simply a means by which we could determine exactly how many classes I would need to run to meet the demand. He wasn’t happy with this… but then, he huffed and puffed, and started saying “fine… whatever… that’s it…” (whatever ‘it’ was). As he stormed out, he turned to me again, and said “In all my years of cruising, this is the most disorganised chaos I have ever seen!….”. Sadly, I couldn’t come up with any better, witty, or helpful retort than “Have you not? Oh.. Okay…”. And then he stormed out.

In his defence; he had apparently been standing in the queue, and when I opened the doors, a few people, who had been sitting in the Columbus Lounge adjacent to the Craft Room, jumped up and barged their way in, jumping the queue. Someone also said that, on one day, some people had started a second queue on the opposite side of the door, in competition.

The 4pm class was not only quiet… there were no fewer than 7 unoccupied seats!

If this happens again, I may have to employ bouncers.