First I was up ridiculously late last night – that actually translates to the wee hours of the morning – then as a consequence, I overslept. Oversleeping then made me late for my appointment with my previous landlady and her final inspection. *sidenote – it went really well* Of course, I then had to wait for my landlady to make the aforementioned final inspection appointment because she was running late.
These two events had the cumulative affect of making everything else I had planned for the day get further and further behind schedule. As the day began to draw to a close, I started to get just a little stressed. All because everything – apart from the oversleeping part – revolved around WAITING!!!
This all came to a head when, returning from my second trip to the nearest post office, I got caught in a traffic jam. I mean really? A traffic jam?? The vitriol was building up like a lava burst from a dormant volcano.
My inner dialogue went something like this: “WHAT?? I repeat, what ARE we doing here?” “First I drive ALL the way to the post office, JUST to find I have to go home and come back! Then, when I get home I have to make lunch! Then I have to come back to the post officeRIGHT DURING RUSH HOUR!!!!!!”
To top it all off, they were working on the road.
Then just as I was about to explode like a mini-Krakatoa, I started to chuckle. Not hysterically – although it was close – ”Well that’s what you get for oversleeping!” Explosion averted, I started pondering about the amount of times we wind up waiting for things. Don’t worry, I had plenty of time, this was a good sized traffic jam.
We wait, it seems, for just about everything. We wait in queues (lines for folks of American extraction) in supermarkets, we wait in the doctors office, in the dentist office, in the bank, at the petrol station, at the post office, at traffic lights and round-a-bouts (traffic circles, again for the American folks), we wait to be served in restaurants and wait to get our food in the same restaurants. We wait for holidays, days off, for the boiler to be mended. Well I could go on, but I think we’d both get bored and a little frustrated thinking about all that waiting.
I guess the thing I was pondering about in that traffic jam ( I’ll bet you thought I’d gone off that subject) was this. How much of that time spent waiting is actually our own fault?
My critical mass point today was the second return trip from the post office. I could have avoided the traffic jam and even have avoided the second trip, if, I had done at least one of two things. If I had not decided in my infinite wisdom to stay up “till the cows come home” and if I had actually paid attention to the website that told me what to bring to the post office to begin with. Whoo, that was a long sentence, wasn’t it?
I know that I’m not alone in getting angry at having to wait. I think that as a human animal we all have this tendency to begrudge our time being “wasted” by having to wait for something. But I’ll bet we could all live with these wasted moments, if we just thought about how we got there to begin with.
I know my waiting today was largely a result of my own actions. Remembering this helped me to calm down and even have a chuckle at my own expense. This was much preferable to having a nuclear meltdown. The next time you’re caught waiting try looking at why. You might find out that you were the cause after all. This may not help, but, at least you’ll know who to pin the blame onto.
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