Earlier this week my car asked to be taken to the shop for repairs. A deep, distressed growl replaced the normal quiet hum of road noise. Either I’d developed a mechanical problem or a dyspeptic grizzly had taken up residence under the hood.
Frankly, given the usual cost of a trip to my mechanic, I hoped it was a bear. At least then I could turn the whole problem over to Animal Control.
An examination of the engine compartment revealed the usual cryptic tangle of wires, hoses, belts, gears, and greasy metal parts. No bears, badgers, beavers or any other unexpected wild fauna.
“Yeah, we don’t see bears real often,” my mechanic said. “We’ll take a look at it. Have a seat in our Waiting Area.”
The Waiting Area. The name conjures images of a tastefully appointed room – maybe something with warm wood paneling, soft cushioned chairs, ferns suspended from the ceiling, quiet music playing in the background, and espresso on demand.
In reality, it’s a space hidden behind three stacks of tires. The hard plastic chairs have cracks in them and an extended wait in one of these chairs means an extended visit to a chiropractor later. Their color varies from bilious green to dried-blood brown. Stalactites made of dried chewing gum decorate their undersides creating a sugary wonderland for any pre-toddler who crawls beneath them.
As it turns out, the chairs are the least of the problems with the waiting area. There’s no soft music. Instead we get a tiny black-and-white TV with a broken antenna, a fuzzy picture, and bad sound. No matter when I go to the mechanic’s, this TV is always playing Jerry Springer. I suspect that somewhere there’s a special TV station that broadcasts Springer twenty-four hours just for mechanics.
Question: What’s more fun than watching a group of people with a total of 13 teeth between them and collective IQ of 50 fighting over who done who wrong? Answer: Everything. Including reading the tasteful collection of antique magazines that have been left to help pass the time.
According to an article I read this past week, Ronald Regan has an excellent chance of being elected to a second term.
In fairness, I have to admit that my mechanic’s waiting room does offer coffee. It’s not espresso, though. This coffee resembles (in color, texture and taste) pine tar. You don’t pour it into a cup so much as scrape it out of the pot. If you look around the Waiting Area you’ll see groups of people industriously chewing their coffee.
Maybe the point of all this is to make the experience so unpleasant that you’re grateful when the mechanic finally comes back to give you the bad news about your car.
“It’s a bearing,” he said. “They only come as a sealed unit. We have one in stock, but it’ll cost about $300. The good news is I can have it changed in about twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes?” I asked, hardly daring to hope. “Really? That fast?”
“Yes, but it will cost $300.”
“But I’ll be out of here in twenty minutes?”
“At a cost of $300.”
“I’ll give you an extra $100 if you have me out of here in fifteen.”
Paying extra to be done early isn’t an option in a doctor’s Waiting Area.
Doctors have been perfecting the art of intolerable waiting since at least the fifteenth century when patients had to sit in muddy streets outside a barbershop waiting to be bled with leaches. Patients could have to sit in squalor for several hours before being seen.
Of course, that was back in the days when Doctors were private practitioners. With modern advances in Medical Management, patients sit in relative comfort waiting several days to be seen. Your average medical waiting room doesn’t show Jerry Springer, though. I suspect this is to prevent patients from being inspired to throw chairs across the room when they get frustrated with the long wait.
The TV in the average medical waiting room is likely to be showing some kind of family-friendly video. After all, you never know who might be stuck in the waiting room. And, honestly, what parent doesn’t want their child anesthetized by brightly colored images before they’re ushered back to the Examination Room where they will wait several weeks in silence until a practitioner of medicine is available to see them?
If you have to take a child to a medical appointment – yours or theirs – by the time you actually see a physician you have read all of the posters in the exam room aloud at least ten times and you are ready to beg your doctor for sedatives. If the doctor prescribes them for the child as well, that’s just a bonus.
I should note at this point, that I’m merely talking about a hypothetical Waiting Area. I’ve never personally had an undue wait to be seen for medical treatment. So, the next time I see my doctor there will be no need for him to give me any additional injections or unneeded exams.
The worst of all medical waiting rooms is the one outside the Intensive Care Unit. There’s nothing funny about being there, so I won’t even try.
The people in that Waiting Room develop a grim sort of esprit de core. You develop sudden friendships based solely on the fact that you’re all suffering and worrying. People exchange medical information about their loved one, talking in clinical terms about the horrible things that have happened and might happen.
Every time a white-coated member of the medical establishment comes in, every head looks up wondering if this latest dispatch from the front lines of the fight for life is about their loved one. Sometimes it’s good news, sometimes it’s not.
In between bulletins, you wait.
Balanced against that kind of slow torture, I guess the time spent in my Mechanic’s Waiting Area isn’t so bad after all.
