Sunday Scribblings – “Wait”

Of all my positive character traits – FAR too numerous to start listing, my pretties - the one that has caused me the most grief over the years is the compulsion to be on time for appointments. Usually I’m not just on time, I actually get to my appointments early. If I'm late it's usually for reasons beyond my control, not because I started out with no time to spare.

When I was younger and possessed of less patience, I would start getting antsy about 10 minutes before the agreed time, and get progressively hotter under the collar for every minute past that time - so that if the person I was meeting was late by just 5 minutes, I’d still be seething. (Eventually it struck me that getting mad at the other person for not being early was a pretty irrational thing to do.)
After many instances where I’d waited at least 15 minutes past the appointed time, and a few where I’d been kicking my heels for a good half an hour, I decided that I too would show up late and make THEM wait for a change. Which was a very good plan of tit-for-tat revenge – or would have been, if only I could have followed through on it.

The problem was that I found it absolutely impossible to force myself to be late. For one thing, I always worried that the other person would end up having to wait – and yes, I know how idiotic it sounds, considering that was the exact situation I wanted to engineer. For another, I was terminally optimistic, telling myself that perhaps on THIS occasion they would be there on time... despite having never experienced any such thing. It was a shining example of is called the triumph of hope over experience.

Finally, after one too many occasions of waiting endlessly, I decided that I would from then on only wait 10 minutes past the agreed time – for anybody, for anything – after which I would either go back or go on, whichever option took my fancy. That worked a lot better, because it gave both me and my friends/family/acquaintances a firm cutoff time... plus, in those far-off days of the dinosaurs, when there were no mobile phones for instant information exchange or real-time updates, at least they would know to ring home and see if I’d gone back there or not.

When I met Pete, I was all optimistic once again, hoping that my luck had changed with regard to the waiting game. Sadly, that was not to be. He is possibly the least time-conscious person I’ve met – I mean, not even in the heady days of first acquaintance did he manage to meet me on time. At first I was inclined to take it personally, accusing him of being late because he didn’t care. But later, when I met his friends, they all reassured me that Pete being late for anything was a given – he was an equal opportunities latecomer, not discriminating against anybody by arriving on time.

That pretty much set the seal on my fate - always a waiter, never a waitee.