Waiting Time

Someone's always saying to us "wait a minute" or "wait up" or "Wait for me." So we do! We wait for a minute, or ten or a half hour.

Once waiting for dinner guest at a restaurant I wrote the following verse.

Tabled company, most unknown,

Furtive glances, exchanged or sown.

Aroma binds and flavor holds

The thoughts of strangers in the folds

Of mindless space and clinking glass.

Enough of that. She’s here at last.

We wait to deposit our payroll checks. We wait in traffic. We wait in restaurants and if you were ever in the Army you know the old saying, "Hurry up and wait".

Mathematician Dr. Thomas Saaty of the University of Pittsburgh years ago fed all kinds of waiting data into his computer and concluded that normal people get very abnormal when lost in line. The gasoline lines of the 70's showed us that with fistfights and even shootings.

It's not just the line around the block that does us in. There are other kinds of lines, the ones formed in our mind. Waiting for someone to pay us the money, parents waiting for teenagers to get home or waiting for a special date or event.

People being people, someone is always ready to profit on all our waiting time. In some of the bigger cities you can pay people to do your waiting for you. Some supermarkets show commercials on a television monitor as you wait in line at the checkout counter. Apparently it works. They say when we wait we get bored. With boredom we eat. It's no wonder wait and weight sound the same.

When the computer added and subtracted all of Dr. Saaty's data it came up with a surprising statistic. In an average life span we spend up to five years, just waiting.

Next time somebody say "wait a minute” maybe we should think twice. But that takes time too.