Waiting...

A few days ago, I spent eight hours waiting.

I was waiting for the words of a wise man – a very busy wise man, who walked past me and glanced at me several times during that eight long long hours.

Eventually, the wise man came to me, poked me, muttered a few trite words – which I could have told him some eight hours earlier – and sent me on my way.

Can you guess where I was?

An NHS hospital ward of course. Long story, but basically some stitches I had got a week earlier fell out, so I went to A&E.

Always a depressing experience among the sick and the lame, this was only brightened by the presence of a terrified researcher from the Discovery Channel asking the various inmates if they were there by virtue of an “amusing mishap” and if so, whether they wished to be featured on a programme called “Bizarre ER”.

I don’t think she found anybody whose symptoms or circumstances were funny, or who wanted the world to perceive them as such.

Had I simply been battered in a drunken brawl, I would have been stitched back up and sent on my way – but because this was a “post operative complication” I was sent upstairs to the surgery ward after about an hour.

And that was when my ordeal really began.

I arrived at 12.45pm – I left at around 9pm. In that time, I was continually assured that the “senior doctor” would be there any moment and that without his say-so, nobody could do anything. In that time I was given (i) two cups of coffee and (ii) a sandwich, at 7.30pm when I went and told the nurses I thought I was going to pass out.

I am convinced I left that hospital in a much worse state of health than I arrived in. I was certainly in a much worse mood.

Now, I could take this opportunity to blast the NHS, but why bother? I don’t want a better NHS – I just want to never have to use it again. It would be nice if doctors treated patients like human beings rather than infected gobbets of blood-flecked mucus and hair they have found smeared on a door handle, but I guess you have to pay cash for that.

No, dear friends – it is the waiting I want to talk about.

I hate waiting anyway. I value my time and I value other people’s time, so I always try to minimise the time anyone spends waiting for me, and I like that courtesy to be reciprocated. I take being kept waiting (unnecessarily) by someone as an explicit statement that they believe their time is more valuable than mine – and I take that as an insult.

But if you know that what you are waiting for is not going to turn up for, say, 30 minutes, an hour, eight hours – then that is a different matter. You can do something with that time. You know what is going on and you are in possession of yourself.

It is the imminent anticipation of something being always about to happen right now, that makes waiting unbearable. You daren’t do anything else, in case you miss it or – god forbid – keep them waiting for you.

Waiting is boring, and being bored is an affront to life. We have only so much time in this life. To waste it by choice is stupid, but at least it’s your own decision. To have it wasted by others is an offence.

That eight hours I spent in a dingy little cubicle being ignored has taught me the value of time and the evil of boredom.