What happened to efficiency and service?

What happened to efficiency and service?  No seriously wheres it gone?  Did it run off and join the circus, or has it jumped ship and gone to live in a commune somewhere dressed in hippy beads and a beard?

The reason I ask is because I've just wasted an entire morning of my ever dwindling life doing precisely three things. Getting a blood test, getting petrol and buying a stamp All that should have taken about a half hour or forty five minutes max!
Getting the blood test took two and a half bloody hours!  It's absolutely insane!  Theres four women working in the hospital blood test room, in the two hours I watched they did twenty blood tests, that's five each in two hours, that's about 24 minutes each, yet each test actually takes about five minutes, and theres bugger all paperwork.  They really need to get the time and motion people in there, that's our money being wasted there.

Getting petrol isn't very quick or efficient these days either!  Years ago you drove into a petrol station (one that wasn't a supermarket) a man in a scruffy overall put the petrol in for you, you paid him and you were off in about three minutes. 
Now it's slightly different, you queue for about five minutes in the middle on the road, then you pull onto the pump, you have to get out in the cold and put the petrol in yourself, then walk to the mini supermarket/petrol station to pay for it, and thats where the trouble really starts.  You see theres about 12 pumps and one woman serving, add in the factor that some of the people in there are doing a weeks shopping and the bloody queue is out the door, across the road and up the nearest bus stop.  To add insult to injury the cashier isn't exactly hurrying,  Oh no she's asking each customer if they collect the points, do you have a bonus card, and worse explaining the benifits of having a bonus card to all those customers who don't have one (and don't want one)  By the time I left the cars were backed up to the M25 or somewhere, and the queue looked like those going to the gulag, talk about depressed, I've seen happier Kamikaze pilots reuniun dinners.

The last straw was the post office, I was the only person in the queue (for a change) but sadly that didn't help.  You see the post office isn't actually a post office any more, it's a Spar shop, they closed the proper post office and turned one of the Spars tills into a post office.  This means you have to share the cashiers with the other customers, trouble is this being Port Talbot that means your sharing a cashier with someone who is about as bright as tinned mikl!  Ok they are some nice normal people in Port Talbot as well, I just never seem to meet them when I'm out shopping. 
In this case the lady being served was buying milk and cat food with a credit card, and she was about a hundred and forty seventeen years old. 
After killing two credit cards with the wrong pin numbers she managed to find one that worked and paid for her shopping, trouble is this all took time, and the cashier had to tell here how to get her other cards unlocked as well, this meant it took me about twenty five minutes to buy a stamp as the only person in the queue.

In the old days I'd have had the blood test done in my doctors surgery in minutes, the man in the overall would have sorted my petrol out and wiped my windscreen by the time I'd got the money out of my pocket, and the nice lady in the post office would have sold me a penny black and I'd have been home in time for breakfast, not a bloody midnight feast!