I just realised the local 7-11 girls are like friends!

Chances are you, like me, run around at a hundred miles an hour going about your daily jobs and errands. Busy, busy, busy I would not have it any other way; without goals each day life can become a little bit boring in my opinion.

So, 7-11 stores, you will find them on every corner and they are very much the fabric of Thailand’s infrastructure (As too is the token Soi dog that you need to step over to get into the store). If you live here in Thailand I am very sure you have one or two local stores in particular that you will use most days. For me one of them is near my home and the other near my office, both very convenient. Of course they are, they are called convenience stores after all!

“Swaddee Ka Churn Ka” is the second thing you hear only after the ‘dee door’ sound made from the door sensor as you pass it when you enter a 7-11. Now, I have been living in Thailand a while now but I only just translated it in my head as ‘Hello Welcome/please’. It is what all the staff say, without fail, whenever a customer walks in. It has become so autonomous for them that I am sure many of them don’t realise they are even say it!

Anyway, and it is just an observation, as I went about my shopping in the store the other day I realised that I knew all of the staff and consciously notice when a new face appears in the store. It, I think the saying in this modern era is now, disrupts me. I may hurtle in and out of a 7-11 as quickly as possible but I do take in the staff faces.

In a lot of ways this blog is a nonsensical article, it has no point to it. It will not leave a mark on you and many of you may even feel you have just wasted a couple of minutes of your time reading it, but stop for one moment. It is actually a rather nice observation when you think about it. People are increasingly caught up in their own worlds, a tad selfish and charging around without a moment to draw breathe. But maybe this one brief moment each day we have of non verbal, daily interaction with the staff in our local 7-11 we should read something into it. They may not be the type of friends you commonly have and socialise with, but we do connect with them with such routine regularity that some kind of bond is formed. In other words they are, in some oddball way, a friend. The 7-11 girls near my home even know my kids names!

Then, just like that, one of them leaves and you never see them again – this after seeing them everyday for months gone by. It is all a rather abrupt end. True, there was no real friendship, but it was like a reassuring familiar face you would interact with as part of your daily routine. People come and go in our life all the time and none of us give it a moments thought.