It’s amazing how much I have started valuing my time as I’m getting older. I sometimes look back to all the hours I had on my hand before I had my son- hours spent in front of the TV watching stuff that added nothing to my life.
Aagh, the folly of youth!
And here I am always begrudging the time that has to be spent in some sort of a waiting room of life- in a subways, in a clinic, in a car, delayed trains or buses…the list is as extensive as the adventures of one’s life.
I am especially thinking of the time I spent yesterday waiting for my bloodwork at the lab yesterday morning. The time in my life that I will never get back, and I did nothing with it.
I am very annoyed, if you can tell…
I spent a whole hour and forty minutes there. All because they have stopped taking appointments, and people are seen on a first-come-first-serve basis.
With that facility being very close to our local hospital, they have no dearth of people showing up for bloodwork or other tests. And that means, waiting is the name of the game.
I know this. I go there because it is so close to my home.
But knowing that I will have to wait doesn’t mean that I always have this hope and optimism in the back of my head telling me that maybe this time things will just move quickly, and there will be fewer people. So I can be out of there in 30 minutes, right?
I always walk in with that hope and desire.
I pay for parking with that hope.
And walk in full of good feeling of finally having made it there (after procrastinating for as long as I can).
Then the lady tells me it’s going to be at least an hour. And still my hope tries to win by telling me she’s exaggerating to make me not get my hopes up too high. It’s going to be ok.
I open my book (coz, well, I can’t show up to a waiting time in my life without a book!), and start reading with all the humming and chattering of the place going on around me, intent on getting though the chapter before I am called. The chapter is done. I look at the screen to see the list of people queued up, and my heart sinks…my name is so far back. This is going to take forever!
I pay for parking for another 30 minutes.
I read another chapter.
I see the clinicians go in and out of cubicles, to the lunch room, to the reception.
They seem to be in no hurry.
They seem to not get that people have lives beyond this lab.
Or maybe they do, and don’t really care.
It would be hard to care for everyone day in and day out, now that I think about it.
I update my parking payment a couple more times.
My name inches up the list slowly.
I don’t read anymore because I am too distracted.
Instead I people watch.
I fiddle with my phone for a bit. Nothing exciting there.
I get busy watching a child play with her stuffie.
Still the queue moves slowly. Until finally I am the second one in the queue.
Ofcourse, the person before me takes the longest of all the people before to get called and be done with his procedure. Finally he’s gone. I wait and will the receptionist to pick up my requisition from the pile, and start entering the details in their computer. And when I am out of all patience, thinking how hungry I am, how much in need of a shower, and work is getting pushed way behind in the afternoon…finally they call me. And five minutes later I am out.
The light of the day has changed by the time I step out. The energy of the traffic has moved from the morning excitement to the afternoon lull. I feel like I am let out of a jail.
Very happy it’s done for a few months.
Very annoyed of having lost all that time in my life.