I was waiting for someone outside a vaccination centre the other day and witnessed the following.

The vaccine centre has a main entrance but, since the number of people being vaccinated has gone up, that main entrance is now for exit only. This entrance has two doors – an automatic door and a manual door opened from the inside only. To access the centre, people have to walk round to the side of the building to queue to gain access.

A woman approached the one of the main entrance doors and couldn’t get in. Someone else waiting – not me I must stress – told them they had to go to the left, where the side entrance was. At that moment, someone came out the automatic door and the woman who had been given the instructions went in. In her mind, she had gone in further round as suggested.

A marshal at the manual door noticed and had to go round and lead them to the right place. As the marshal did so, three more people approached the manual door and, as someone was leaving, held the door so all three could go in.

There were now four people in the wrong part of the building and two marshals having to try and sort it out. A queue quickly formed at the manual door as more people tried to access the centre and it took two more marshals to sort the problem out over a space of five minutes or so.

What went wrong? And how would you fix it?