Husband and I, his sister, a family member and his wife decided to spend the day together today. The plan was to go to the mall for a little bit and then go out to different places since they dont live in london and were only here for a visit. We started off by going to the mall, which was extremely busy since its a Saturday. Hubby and i have a newborn who was born with a lung infection and is therefore much more vulnerable when it gets to covid and we are in general much more careful since we do not want to risk anything with him after what we have been through. My husband and i stayed for around 15 minutes and then quickly realised it was way too busy for a vulnerable newborn so we told the others that we will wait for them in the car park (thinking it won’t be too long since we hadnt planned to stay for long anyway).
I didnt want to be rude to the others so out of respect i told them “it is unsafe for the baby here due to the reasons mentioned , we will wait for you in the car park, and since i didnt want to be rude and make them leave immediately i said don’t worry about us take your time.”
For me this was out of respect thinking it would be common sense that if someone is waiting in the car park, they wouldnt make you wait for too long, especially if the plan was only to be there for a little while and then go somewhere else. In my head i was thinking we would wait 10 minutes, 20 minutes , 30 minutes, even an hour i would be still accepting of, but they made us wait for 2 hours with a newborn in the carpark who got extremely fussy.
For me i found this very rude but didnt want to say anything as i tried to understand that queues at tills might have been busy, they might have got lost etc, And was expecting something like “hi guys sorry to keep you waiting, how are you?” When they come back. However they came back extremely dry, almost mad at us themselves (probably for leaving to wait in the car park even though we have a very reasonable excuse) which topped off what already made me quite disappointed and that drove me insane and i bursted at them and told them how rude it was for them to keep us waiting for two hours and then instead of apologising, or even catching up and saying things like hi what should we do now, they were acting all dry themselves, didnt speak to us, and For some reason they didnt even want to do anything else after (which we had initially planned to do other stuff other than the mall) and just planned themselves to go early to our dinner which we were invited to.
They then answered with “ why did you say take your time if you don’t want to wait”
And now i’m thinking was it wrong for me to expect it to be common sense that you wouldnt make people with a newborn to wait 2 hours even if they said take your time? Isnt it obvious that saying take your time is meant out of respect and not to be taken literally? As i said, for me something reasonable would be waiting 30 minutes - 60 minutes max given the business.
What do you guys think?
They never ended up apologising for making us wait for so long, I apologised for exploding which now i regret doing not gonna lie.
FYI i did tell hubbys sister not to stay long since we are waiting in the car park so she knew all along and said okay but then cared nothing, its just the family members that i’m talking about that i said take your time.