The Waiting Room

In memoriam of EN

Waiting rooms are very boring places. It really doesn’t make that much sense for a place to have THAT many people and still be boring. Furthermore, the type of people that you come across at any given waiting room may as well get together and start a new planet; planet Freakshow. This is of course based on a terribly crude and baseless prejudgment … but it’s a Monday and that’s acceptable.

I was at a waiting room for a brief period of time, about thirty minutes or so. My car was getting some juice and so were the cars of the other 10 people waiting there.

This one guy, we’ll call him the tough guy -- homeboy was tattooed up to the T. Maybe it’s the new dukes of hazard movie coming out but confederate flags seem to be the “IN” thing these days, and sure enough he had the confederate cap to match. Everyone preoccupies their time with something. Tough guy chose to do that by flipping through an off-roading magazine.

Us stereotyping and bord folks will have nothing better to do than start playing the “fill in the blanks” game. It’s fun and it entails one filling in the blanks about a fellow waiter. For example, Tough guy drives The Truck in Service bay B.

As part of the game, I also went ahead and guessed tough guy’s name. I said Bubba or Jim but I was wrong. This is what happened while tough guy was being a bad ass in the waiting room, with his mean truck magazine:

The mechanic walked in and yelled: “Is Shannon in here?”

Tough guy stood up and walked towards the mechanic (doesn’t necessarily ‘admit’ to the name)… but it got worse for him, apparently “Shannon” was also that blonde co-ed, who simultaneously stood up and rushed for the door yelling, Yes, I’m Shannon. The look on his face was priceless. They both laughed it off and diffused the confusion when our co-ed wasn't too hot about discussing trucks.

Shannon must have free weekends on her phone (who doesn’t?) she spent the entire time she waited letting us all know her business such as the 17,000 in undergrad loans which she hasn’t consolidated by the July 1, 2005 interest hike deadline (uh oh). If there’s ever a planet Freakshow, I want shares in the telecomm company.

Shannon and ‘tough guy’ may not have shared reproductive organs but they shared a first name and that provided us with a decent break during the uneventful wait. Although it was a little more challenging to clear up, the entertainment was so 5-minutes-ago when 2 other fellow waiters shared a car make AND car color. You knew it was rough when they BOTH had to go outside and look at the license plate. If I were ever in the situation, I would have personally laid claim to the ‘nicer’ car without that scratch on the door (who wouldn’t?)

Perhaps we aren’t all strangers after all; the common bonds of androgynous first names and mass manufacturability tie us all.

There’s always “the cool guy” in every waiting room. He usually has headphones on and is seemingly the most anti-social of the entire group. Who goes into a waiting room with headphones? It’s somewhat insulting to the other people waiting in that “the cool guy” doesn’t acknowledge their existence or care about their phone conversations or what they were reading.
However, “the cool guy” is surely trickier than he seemed. Headphones on don’t necessarily mean music is on. It’s a TRAP! It’s a TRAP for all the other freak shows so that THIS cool guy can listen in on everything the fellow waiters reveal under the comfort blanket that he isn’t listening. Oh, but I was … I was listening and I have a decent memory.

Note: Also, R.I.P. John Garang. What happens now? Today: Steel.