Cursed Tongue: Waiting Rooms: The Fifth Ring of Hell

Posted by CursedTongue on October 23, 2006

It never fails. Forget to bring a book to a doctor’s appointment or the DMV, and the wait will be interminable. Not simply because you have nothing to distract you from the mind-numbing drone of hits of the 80’s Muszak, but because the evil, Murphy’s law forces of the Universe have conspired to gather every medical mystery within a 20 mile radius and plopped them into the already overbooked doctor’s morning line-up.

The Universe does pick on insignificant specks called mortals, because it is bored, probably from waiting the lobby of the Interuniversal Bureau of Unequivocal Absurdity. It sounds melodramatic, but I’m sure that someday we’ll find proof of the sardonic sense of humor that pervades the cosmos on a molecular level.

Part of my issue with waiting is my compulsive punctuality. Okay, it’s actually compulsive earliness. I could pretend it’s because I hold out hope that they’ll be able to get me in early. But really it’s because I have a special talent for getting lost.

When I became a new patient at a gynecologist I left extra early because I knew I’d be filling out paperwork. I walked into a room packed with wooden kitchen chairs, pregnant women, and a mat on the middle of the floor that passed as a poorly situated play area. Behind the official doctor’s office window there was a receptionist who looked like Britney Spears, back when she was cute. And twelve.

I introduced myself to Britney and she gave me a stack of paper about a quarter of an inch thick and invited me to sit. With potentially pregnant and older sitters coming in after me, I couldn’t very well take a seat with a fart muffler tied to it, so I sat in one of the bare wooden chairs. After about the fifth time filling in my address, my butt had pretty much fallen asleep. Paperless society, my numb ass.

After about an hour of restlessly shifting, being groped through the bars of the chair from the play area and playing Solitaire on my Personal Digital Assistant, I figured it was time to talk to Britney. Someone who wasn’t a spineless pushover doormat would have probably talked to Britney sooner. It turned out that they lie to new patients about the time of their appointment so they show up early enough to fill out the 30 pages of paperwork. And they were running late. No one seemed surprised by this. So they were overbooking insignificant mortal specks who lied for the pure pleasure of lying.

About 30 minutes later Britney called their branch office, to see if they could take some appointments. Two women were sent over there. It was another 45 minutes before I was called upon to limp over to a room where I would freeze in a paper gown on the examination table for an additional 30 minutes. It was absolutely the longest doctor’s appointment ever. And I’ve waited in emergency rooms over the holidays. Compared to my morning at the lying gynecologist’s, waiting in the car dealership for a surprise automotive overhaul when I went in for an oil change wasn’t so bad. Even though I’d been forced to forage through the dealership for my lunch, coming up with only vending machine peanuts and a coke.

Because of my vast waiting room experience, I’ve honed many skills to combat boredom. Instead of smothering the receptionist with that mangled copy of Golf Digest, I recommend making up games you can play in your head. My favorite is, “Why did Little Miss Prissy, who came in late, get to go in first?” Closely followed by, “What’s that smell?”

Or you could invent stories about the people in the waiting room with you. Take the small child, who is screaming at the top of their lungs, for example. (It’s federally mandated to have one of these in every waiting room.) Will the child grow up to be a parole officer? Or will they end up on the other side of the bars? Was the child’s mother aware that there would be work involved before she decided to have the child? Will someone, someday tell the mother off for letting said child run around like a wobbly, unmedicated mental patient?

There are always the usual boredom fallbacks, counting ceiling tiles, twiddling thumbs, constructing a grocery list that you’ll forget in a half hour. Or you can stare cross-eyed at the wildly patterned carpet, in color combinations you thought only a circus could love, until you get dizzy.

With the rise of cell phones there has been an infestation of talkers in waiting rooms. These people call someone so they have something to do. The number of people who are available to keep waiters company is simply shocking. This pursuit is fun for others in the waiting room only if the person at the other end has a life, and can’t spend two hours entertaining the caller. Personally, I think these people should take up knitting if they don’t want to read Golf Digest.

My grandfather, God rest his soul, blew a gasket every time he had to wait 30 seconds for a traffic light to turn green. I learned that above all, waiting time is time to relax. It’s time to breath. It’s no use agonizing about the things you could be doing. Although I have spent time drafting letters to my Congressman about the sorry state of the U. S. healthcare system. No one should have to wait three hours to have a bean dislodged from their nose.

- Sarah Letnes

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