Last week, I sat in a waiting room for what felt like an unusually long time.
You’ve been there. For each type of waiting room you sit in, you have a built-in “how long feels right” clock in your head cemented through years of experience and redundancy. If you get called before that time, you’re delighted. If it takes longer, you’re annoyed.
OK, so I’m annoyed, and I’ve left my phone in the car.
There’s some random TV in the corner across the room, but honestly, what’s TV? Who could possibly care about or engage with the moving pictures spewing forth from that thing? It could be a benign fixer-upper show or some ad trying to make me a better man through chemistry. Hard to tell.
I scout the end tables for an interesting magazine. In pre-phone days, I never minded sitting in waiting rooms that offered interesting magazines. Sports Illustrated, Time, and Outside were my gotos. Thoughtful and well-crafted journalism, storytelling, and writing in general. Good magazine articles served a niche between the newspaper and narrative non-fiction and comprised the important pieces of both. I both learned and felt something. Sometimes, while engrossed in a good magazine article, I’d be disappointed when they called my name.
But nothing here. Not one magazine. There’s a few pharma advertising cards laying around, but that’s it. Oh, maybe there’s a rack in a central location. Nope.
I miss magazines in waiting rooms.
