CARLTON FLETCHER: Americans warm up to new mantra: Hurry up and wait

“I will wait, I will wait for you.”

— Mumford & Sons

I’ll confess up front: I have all the patience of a boiling tea kettle. Especially when I’m behind the wheel of a car.

(Something I’m not proud of: Passengers in vehicles that I have driven of late have taken to mockingly using what I didn’t realize had become one of my go-to phrases. When someone does something to aggravate me while I’m behind the wheel, my knee-jerk response has become a shouted “Stupid b—-!” This wasn’t, I’ll make clear, a gender thing. Just something that came out in my admittedly Irwin County drawl. Now, the people who once laughed at my crude behavior have taken to mocking me for it. No, I’m not proud of my boorishness, so I just take the ribbing good-naturedly.)

My bad behavior notwithstanding, I have recently been made aware of some statistics that back up my contention that, not only are the dangerously bad teenage/millennial drivers endangering our lives by texting while behind the wheel, American drivers in general have become so lazy and rushed that they’re threatening our future oil supplies by wasting hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel at a time when we’re supposed to be so environmentally conscious.

Read this statistic; it’ll blow your mind.

According to Wired magazine, which relied on people who research these kinds of things — you know, the people we call “they,” as in “They say we’re … — Americans waste 400,000 gallons of gasoline a day sitting in line at restaurant drivethrus. Let’s say gas is $2 a gallon … that’s just shy of a million dollars a day we waste just sitting in line waiting for a food order.

(These days, it looks like about maybe a fourth of that total is from patrons waiting in line at Hip-Hop Chicken on Slappey.)

But that number, to me, is one of those tip-of-the-iceberg figures that tells only part of the story. What “they” didn’t tell us in their research is how much fuel we Americans waste sitting at drivethrus at banks, pharmacies and liquor stores. I’d say that 400,000 figure would easily double at bank drivethrus.

(Agreeing with squawkers: A couple of frustrated contributors to this newspaper’s Squawkbox feature have wondered angrily why banks have not opened their lobbies for customer transactions. Most of them already have shields in place to ward off customer drool and such, and making needed changes to protect employees wouldn’t seem like a big fix. If Taco Bell, Super Cuts, Bowl-a-Rama, Larry’s Liquors and Joe’s Garage have been determined “essential,” how in the hell can businesses whose reason for existence is handling our money not be so designated? In other words, it’s time to get the banks back open. It’s hard to conduct vital business texting back and forth while sitting in parking lots or waiting in line for an hour or so to cash a check.)

Oh, and the 400,000 gallons of gas per day we’re wasting sitting in restaurant drivethru lines? That amounts, according to Wired, to 20,000 barrels of oil.

Plus — and get this — these are pre-COVID numbers. With restaurants’ dining rooms closed for an extended period of time during the early stages of the pandemic, it was drivethru, delivery or nothing, when it came to picking up food from restaurants. Imagine how high that number shot up as COVID dictated most of our actions. I’d guess it was easily double … so around 800,000 gallons a day at a conservative estimate of $1.6 million.

This at a time when we Americans pride ourselves on our eco-consciousness … which is really nothing more than self-delusion if we look at these millions of gallons of gas we waste each week and the tons of plastic we’ve dumped into our oceans, threatening all forms of aquatic life.

Surely there are foreigners visiting our country who see us queued up and waiting for large segments of time at all these “convenient” drivethrus who shake their heads and, in their various foreign tongues, mutter, “Stupid b—-es.”