Scenes from the struggle in Tesco
This is still just the beginning of this thing. I’m still making jokes about it. Sometimes I forget to wash my hands. The schools are still open, the pubs are still open, even if Boris has told everyone to stop going to them. I’m still “in” work from my living room table, and we still plan to do this major product rollout that’s been in the works for a year and a half.
But there’s little signs of worry. Mainly in the supermarkets.
Traditionally, I’d go onto the Ocado website on Thursday evening, book a delivery slot for Saturday morning, and effectively just use magic to point at all the things I want to have, and then in a day or two, someone brings them to my door. Much like the manufacturing industry, I’ve been operating a just-in-time schedule where, by the end of the week, I have basically nothing left. Except cat litter, which I have legitimately been stockpiling for months.
A couple of days ago, Ocado implemented a “virtual queue”. It took fifteen minutes to get on the site. I spent that time browsing GitHub to see if their architecture was open source, because their scaling policies must be awful. Looks like they use Java. Today, the virtual queue is two hours, and when I got in, the site itself didn’t work. I have, luckily, booked a delivery for Thursday, but god knows what will actually arrive.
There’s also a really big Tesco down the road. I went there around lunchtime on Monday, for lunch purposes, and it had the biggest queue I’ve ever seen there. I tried to game the system and go at 9pm tonight, but that also backfired, see below.
Hope you don’t want toilet roll.
Or vegetables
Or soap
France has locked everyone in their house. The Euros are going to be in 2021. The Tories somehow found £350 billion down the side of the couch. The economy is going to be interesting. I bought a bunch of vegetables to grow, but I was going to do that anyway. Don’t want to sound like a crazy person.
Be more like Jones.
