I used to be impatient.
Now I have become obsessed with how long things take. Being impatient suggests that there is some patience left in me. It’s in the word. Im….Paitent. Paitent I’m not. To say I can’t wait is an understatement and lately everything takes far too long. Possibly this is a side effect of being on that side of the balance sheet where there is less time left for me than what has gone before.
A slow moving checkout line at the store seems to take forever. If the person in front of me is slow producing the means to pay I feel like screaming at them to move it along, I’ve got a party to get to! A traffic light stop that involves more than one cycle of red green yellow oh no don’t tell me its red again, makes me seethe with resentment.
Maybe society has produced this complete inability on my part to go with the flow. Everything now is geared towards faster, quicker and slicker. I have gone from wanting fast food to expecting instant food. Slow cooker? Hell no! I want it microwaved and even that seems to take far too long.
I can remember making popcorn as a young sprout. The stove had to heat the oil in the pan. You had to put a few test kernels in to see if it was hot enough. Then the shaking and waiting. Now if my microwave takes three minutes to pop my Jiffy Pop I feel like I have been robbed of a lifetime.
Is there a longer wait then for a car to warm up on a frosty cold morning? And speaking of frosty cold ones does eternity pass for you while you wait for a refill at a restaurant? And what is up with that waiting for the check at the end of the meal? That seems to take longer than the eating. That last 50 cents on the gas pump where it slows down at the end of a fill up? The pyramids were built in less time.
Taking pictures used to be an experience that involved days if not weeks, while you used up a roll of film, took it to the drugstore and waited for it to be developed. Now I get ants in my pants if the pictures on the web site take more than a second to refresh.
And computers? Is it just me or is this booting up process designed to test you? And why does it take just as long to shut down?
In the words of Jim Morrison: “We want the world and we want it NOW!†But then again look what that got him.
