Waiting Rooms

Is it just me or do waiting rooms give you the jitters?

Waiting in Government funding offices, clutching your recently printed reformatted, readjusted, rewritten business plan in sweaty hands, practising the words of your carefully crafted presentation that tumble and stick in your brain, waiting to see if you are accepted or rejected. Sucked in or spit out.

Hospital waiting rooms, surrounded by crying families, sniffling children and day time television, expecting results from two-week old studies that involved numerous blood sucking and technologically baffling swivelling apparatus that have the capacity to tell you your fate. Waiting to see if, according to the experts, you will live to see another day, or if you have to endure yet more of the same painful procedures before you will know the truth.

Waiting for a job interview, watching the other applicants exit with smiles on their faces, and sweat patches encircling the underarms of their once pristine interview outfits. Waiting to see if your job experience, and your personality, is enough to beat all of the others.

What has somehow come to pass is that the negative associations of waiting rooms have now been transferred in my brain to the simple act of waiting in a room, regardless of the situation. Perhaps it is now inbuilt in the act of sitting on a comfortable couch, overseen by a receptionist, surrounded by boring, germ ridden magazines. Even when the outcomes are slightly less important, with less of the unexpected nature about them - if my hair will still be manageable for instance - with none of the pressure, none of the life changing consequences that are attached to other scenarios, I still feel my body contract, screaming - "get me out of here!"

Next time I am meeting with one of you for some reason or another, I have one request - please don't keep me waiting :)

Ellen