Having been recently forced to endure a painful hour and half at a waiting room at a hospital, I can safely say that it is one of the worst punishments you can ever burden one with. It's quite a pain, even with the usually comforting blessings of music, headphones and good company.
The arrangement of chairs in the waiting room is strange: each is amazingly well placed to directly face another, resulting in a necessity to stare into another person's worried face at some point or another. It's not pleasant at all. At first, you're sure you can handle it; indulging in a little staring match is engaging, sure. But slowly, you realise how unnerving it really is. Relentlessly, in every second marked by the ticking of the obnoxiously loud clock on the wall, the other person will stare at you, using their powers of deduction to guess your ailment and just how contagious it is. Naturally, sitting in a hospital, their medical diagnosis can be trusted to be accurate and fair. But no matter what they finally deduce, they will continue to glare at you as if any moment you're going to leap up and burst into a rainbow-hued flame. It's lovely.
Aside from the delightful company you have, there are many more things that highlight the pain of waiting rooms. Doctors, being the incredibly busy people that they are, handle almost 100 patients a day, at least 50 animals, a few stray aliens and the odd inanimate object and hence often have no time to press the button to call in the next patient. Understandably, it means a 5:30 appointment will be pushed back to 7:15, for the greater good of course. Now you may not be prepared for this, and may just end up sitting aimlessly amongst a group of equally bored and worried patients, each waiting to maul one another to meet the doctor first. No matter how much you may feel like it, do not, under any circumstances, attempt to begin conversation with anyone you do not know at a hospital waiting room.
If you do, you're in for a long, detailed and often gruesome tale about the person's ailment, why they got it, when they got it, where they got it, who they got it from, what it does to them at different times of the day, the worst thing it's done to them, the various forms of medicine they eat and just how lovely their doctor is and how you should never meet him until they're done with him because quite obviously, they're about to drop dead from whatever it is they're ailing from. Trust me, looking away is just a whole lot safer.
It's easy to get bored and simply listening to music on your headphones and counting the number of tiles the overhead false ceiling is made of just doesn't cut it. You need something to do, and nothing around you seems very helpful in giving you it. When a good song comes up, you'll momentarily forget being bored in a wild attempt to control your overwhelming dancing desires and might give in, just to see how the zombies around you would react. If you do decide to, video record and email the carnage to me please.
Perhaps waiting rooms are integral to the functioning of a well - rated hospital, but honestly, I see a lot more practicality in allowing patients barging into offices rather than letting them rot and morph into zombies who'd storm offices anyway. Just some food for thought. Speaking of food...catch you later readers.
The arrangement of chairs in the waiting room is strange: each is amazingly well placed to directly face another, resulting in a necessity to stare into another person's worried face at some point or another. It's not pleasant at all. At first, you're sure you can handle it; indulging in a little staring match is engaging, sure. But slowly, you realise how unnerving it really is. Relentlessly, in every second marked by the ticking of the obnoxiously loud clock on the wall, the other person will stare at you, using their powers of deduction to guess your ailment and just how contagious it is. Naturally, sitting in a hospital, their medical diagnosis can be trusted to be accurate and fair. But no matter what they finally deduce, they will continue to glare at you as if any moment you're going to leap up and burst into a rainbow-hued flame. It's lovely.
Aside from the delightful company you have, there are many more things that highlight the pain of waiting rooms. Doctors, being the incredibly busy people that they are, handle almost 100 patients a day, at least 50 animals, a few stray aliens and the odd inanimate object and hence often have no time to press the button to call in the next patient. Understandably, it means a 5:30 appointment will be pushed back to 7:15, for the greater good of course. Now you may not be prepared for this, and may just end up sitting aimlessly amongst a group of equally bored and worried patients, each waiting to maul one another to meet the doctor first. No matter how much you may feel like it, do not, under any circumstances, attempt to begin conversation with anyone you do not know at a hospital waiting room.
If you do, you're in for a long, detailed and often gruesome tale about the person's ailment, why they got it, when they got it, where they got it, who they got it from, what it does to them at different times of the day, the worst thing it's done to them, the various forms of medicine they eat and just how lovely their doctor is and how you should never meet him until they're done with him because quite obviously, they're about to drop dead from whatever it is they're ailing from. Trust me, looking away is just a whole lot safer.
It's easy to get bored and simply listening to music on your headphones and counting the number of tiles the overhead false ceiling is made of just doesn't cut it. You need something to do, and nothing around you seems very helpful in giving you it. When a good song comes up, you'll momentarily forget being bored in a wild attempt to control your overwhelming dancing desires and might give in, just to see how the zombies around you would react. If you do decide to, video record and email the carnage to me please.
Perhaps waiting rooms are integral to the functioning of a well - rated hospital, but honestly, I see a lot more practicality in allowing patients barging into offices rather than letting them rot and morph into zombies who'd storm offices anyway. Just some food for thought. Speaking of food...catch you later readers.
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