Why people who miss trains run out of milk

I never run out of things in the bathroom. That's because, as soon as I am down to my last "one" of anything (shaving foam, talc, shampoo, conditioner, etc) I buy a back-up straight away. The same applies in the kitchen. As Peter Kay observed, you never run out of salt, but people are always running out of mustard, honey, sugar, olive oil and, of course, milk. Now, not running out of stuff isn't that complicated. It isn't difficult to estimate how quickly you run through stuff, add in a fairly large comfort cushion for standard deviation, and then keep that much in reserve. And no-one is going to go bankrupt from throwing away a half-pint of milk that happened to go off.

But people still run out of milk. And why is this? Because these people don't believe in comfort zones. These are the people you see stranded on motorways because they have run out of petrol, and these are the people who miss trains. I don't think that I have ever missed a train. Occasionally I have arrived at a station so early that I have been in time for the previous train, but I have never, ever, cut things so fine that I have had to rush for a train.

It's an attitude thing, I think, a kind of laid-back, non-control-freakery, method of looking at life which I clearly do not have. If the petrol gauge gets below a half, then I start looking for petrol stations. If it might, just might, take me an hour at worst to get to a place, then I will leave with an hour and a quarter to spare. And if the milk carton gets to three-quarters empty, I'm off to Tesco's.