Do you hate to wait?

“You’re in the wrong line. That line over there is for renewals; this one is for new registrations only. Next!”

“Thank you for calling. We are experiencing greater than normal call volume. Someone from our staff will be with you in a moment…. Did you know that we were rated by J.D. Power as #1 In Customer Service?… you are now caller number forty-three in line….”

“There is a tie-up ahead, expected to last for forty minutes…you are still on the fastest route to your destination.”

I hate to wait.

When you could do this, I thought the perfect travel to and through the airport involved knocking on the closed door of an airplane to get the flight crew to let you on. I missed some planes.

I was once perpetually late, a habit born of underestimating work and travel time, and overestimating my own capability. I’m much better now.

My wife never suffered from this affliction. Shortly after she accepted my proposal, I said,

“Oh no!”

“What?”

“I’m going to be early for the rest of my life!”

It is true.

We never miss a plane. That’s not hard to do when you are at the gate two hours early. We routinely wait for them to clean the movie theatre from the previous showing so we can be the first to be seated, before even the ads are shown. We never miss the previews.

When we do things together, we wait a lot.

But we are not alone. The average American spends 2-5 years of their life waiting. That works out to 35-40 minutes a day. Collectively, we spend 37 billion hours per year…waiting in line.

“Line forms on the right…no cutting…”

We wait in traffic, on hold, for nonexistent customer service, and more and more we wait for healthcare.

Doctors’ Waiting Room

“The first appointment I can give you is in _____”

“That’s four months away!”

“It’s what I have… sorry.”

“The doctor will be with you shortly.”

This situation is exacerbated because I’m old. Old people have more medical patch-up work.

Every annual physical starts a cycle of specialist follow-ups.

“Probably should see the ____ – cardiologist, urologist, gabafracologist “- OK, I made that last one up.

“Just to be safe we should get an X-Ray, MRI, PET scan, CAT scan, stress nukeGBQ with max-contrast” (I made up that last one too.)

For every one of these, you have to deal with “medical groups,” Permanente, Athena, Summit, Optum, etc.  Some of these are hospital networks, some are loose confederations of physicians, and some are private equity run corporate rollups. They have systemized healthcare, centralized and optimized scheduling, and worked doctors to death in search of a buck.

What they have in common is one manufactured product: Wait Time.

“They’re not customers; they are patients. They should show some patience”

Waiting for Customer Service

There was a brief magic period in the 1980s and 1990s, after Tom Peters and Bob Waterman lionized companies who were “close to the customer.” Business suddenly found the religion of customer service.

If there was a line at the airline ticket counter there were “queue-combers” to expedite check-in for those with an impending flight. Hotels changed your sheets and towels daily, and provided warm chocolate-chip cookies and concierges at check-in. And real people answered the phone and took your money.

That was before phone-trees, kiosk check-in, online and chip payments, etc. Now a phone tree bot suggests you “manage your experience online at ____.com/support.” Then the site is down, and you wait for a chatbot, wait to chat with a human, wait till we resolve technical difficulties, and are advised to wait and reconnect at a less busy time.

It’s not going to get better. We might have to learn the art of waiting.

The Art of Waiting

I don’t think of myself as an impatient person. My kids say, “Pop’s really patient… until he isn’t.” I am (mostly) patient about things clearly beyond my control, like traffic, or the DMV. However, I haven’t learned the art of waiting.

What do I mean by the art of waiting?

You’ve seen them. People who sit in a doctor’s office, or airport gate, serenely reading a book or doing Sudoku. They anticipated waiting, and brought something pleasant and simple to fill the time.

They are not doom-scrolling the news on their phones. They are not hopping up every five minutes to ask how much longer the wait will be. They are not stress-eating candy bars.

They are also not disturbing others, doing business on cellphones, or raucously laughing like oblivious teenagers, or interrupting someone else’s Zen with a series of complaints or chatterbox tales of Aunt Martha.

I think wait time is great for conversation, if you are with someone interesting. You have to be careful though. My friend Roopa and I once missed our flight to Detroit while sitting at a Newark airport gate. We were so thoroughly engaged that we were oblivious to multiple boarding calls for our flight. We were seated twenty feet from the podium.

David Sedaris, the humorist writer, uses his wait time to fill his diary with potential material, by observing people and listening to how strangers answer his friendly queries. Sedaris has been doing this successfully for years, as evidenced by his many best selling books. I have asked strangers on a bus, “What’s the meaning of life?” That has produced some unusual wisdom as well as some strange looks.

Writing is Waiting

I am a new writer in an old body. Writing has its own unique wait time. Sometimes I wait for ideas. Sometimes I wait for a draft to cure, to let my draft-love dissipate, so I can self-edit; it’s never easy. Sometimes I wait anxiously for Billie to edit. My writing is always better after she  has her way with it, but I dread the red ink, perhaps a holdover from less-than-kind English teachers growing up.

Now, I am waiting for an external editorial assessment on my next book, Wisdom from Unusual Places: Reflections on Workin’, Lovin’ and Livin’ Wisely. I am also waiting for a friend to finish transcribing a couple of my songs so I can copyright them. I am waiting out the last remaining specialist follow-ups from my physical. I am waiting for solutions to some tech issues.

It feels a little like the Bardo, the Tibetan transition state between life and death. It is not.

I think the key to the art of waiting is to have something else to do, something that is distracting but can be put down when the waiting abruptly ends.

I have lots of other things I could do. I have a dozen or so projects in my workshop, an unfinished woodcarving, changing the action on two cigar box guitars I built during Covid. I’ve been threatening to take guitar lessons after sixty years of self-taught dabbling. They each are start-up ventures I might be loath to put down.

I could read. I could walk. I could call a friend. I could plan a vacation. Or I could write a post about the Art of Waiting.

 

How do you practice the Art of Waiting?

 

 

* Note: I chose “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper to illustrate this post because I love the hard lines Hopper portrays, sharp contrast, light or dark with very little transition space. Are the people in the diner patiently  waiting for something?