Time Spent Waiting

I’m re-reading an excellent book entitled Waiting for Autumn by Scott Blum. I recommend it as a delightful story filled with allegory and fantasy.

The title engendered thoughts about waiting.

Someone is 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.

Several years ago a systems analyst fed all kinds of waiting data into a computer and concluded that ordinary people get very abnormal when waiting in line. They get angry and irritable.

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 they owe or waiting for teenagers to get home.

In some of the more prominent cities, you can pay people to do your waiting for you. Some supermarkets show commercials on a television monitor as people wait in line. Apparently, it works. They say when we wait we get bored. With boredom, we eat. It's no wonder wait, and weight sounds the same.

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