The waiting room

The waiting room is where the slack catches up with us. Waiting is a good excuse to start breathing. Once you are breathing besides the flow of oxygen through your windpipes some other things also happen. For instance when you breathe, and you are in the midst of people, the stardust of broken and crushed stories flows into your lungs too. The perverted stories of the waiting room are not like the stories of the crematorium or the cemetery. They are not paused stories composed after a whole life, these are not stories marked with a before and after. These are not stories which are warm with passion, resonant with energy and rhythmic with the benefits of hindsight. The stories of the waiting room are the interrupted, harassed stories of people who have been forced to be in limbo for something or the other.

Once you are in limbo, it is like your immunity is down to near-zero. At near-zero immunity, every thought in your head that you had been pushing to a side all the past days, suddenly tries to take over. So you are thinking of the change in your hairstyle, that new fitness program, the relationship problems, the insides of your boss leaking from your hand as you draw your hand back after puncturing her body with your knife, twisting it around and relishing that moment. All those random thoughts, some from memory, some from the archives of your desire trouble you.

In the waiting room also your defences are not so strong. Instead of the stone fortress which protects your active mind's direction of whimsy, now you just have a run-down army of fly-swatters. This run-down army cannot do anything much, it can just rush about here and there but do nothing. Everyday when you want to shake off vexing sequences of thoughts from your head, you pace around, clean up already clean surfaces, read, search for things on google which you do not want to find out anything about. But now you are locked to your seat, you get up to so much as go to the toilet and you might come back to find that someone else is now sitting in that seat and you are set back by another few hours. So you just stay put in your seat, squirm around at best, concede the battle in your head to all the invisible armies proposing fantastic new forms of nihilism.

So in this condition, what happens? Lots of nano-scale tweaks and changes in your world. You arbitrarily decide to stop going to the gym anymore, because of all the time that you have to waste in the waiting room, you try to economise elsewhere and reform, keep the flow of your daily routine in roughly the same form.

When the designer was designing the hospital she was considering not having a waiting room at all. She thought, oh people wait because there is a waiting room, what if there is no waiting room at all. Will people come just-in-time? What if everyone comes just-in-time together, will they install sensitive cameras that can measure differences in milliseconds to help them decide who is first? Will that process take months and years sometimes because of disagreements in the forensic community? But basically if there is no waiting room, we will all become a weird kind of people. Our entire system will be coherent and pre-configured, there will be no room for external variants to dramatically alter our world. Now lovers bank on their partner undergoing substantial transformation every time they so much as go to the beauty parlour, the passport office or even the supermarket on a busy day. If they can no longer do that relationships will become on the whole unstable and impossible to sustain. People just won't change, as often and as randomly enough and every week there masses of people will get dumped and every week masses of people will find new lovers.

One repercussion of this will be that the myth of eternal love will go bust and love will become a commonplace, everyday disaster like indigestion, flight-delay and traffic-jam. Love will become a passing fancy, like dry sand draining out of a funnel, only to be filled up again after a short time.

Another bright and visionary architect will also come onto the scene and think about all these things and think of filling up the whole of the urban landscape with millions and millions of waiting rooms. These will be special waiting rooms, sometimes it will not even be clear what the wait is for, there will be even placebo waiting rooms. Waiting rooms which have all the trappings of the waiting room, the token numbers, the screen showing your position in the queue, everything but actual delivery of a service or a product. And this will actually work, some people will actually even pay for this.