Every waiting room operates on its own private clock. You arrive with a fully charged phone and a full personality. Forty minutes later, you have named the rubber plant, read a magazine from a year you would rather forget, and renegotiated your relationship with several chairs.
The desk will tell you the doctor is “running a bit behind.” A bit behind is a direction, not a duration. So is “shortly” — a word that, in waiting-room dialect, means sometime before the heat death of the universe, optimistically.
Here is the twist: the longer you wait, the more your symptoms improvise. The thing you came in for goes quiet, out of politeness, and something new opens in its place. By the time you are called, your chief complaint has developed a subplot.
The appointment itself lasts nine minutes. The wait was ninety. Somebody somewhere is doing that math and calling it a system. We are allowed to raise an eyebrow at the math.
