About a quarter of a century ago, I had my blood pressure tested. I can’t remember why. There was nothing wrong with me, I think it was one of those ‘check-ups’ the body mechanics use in an attempt to find something that needs fixing.
The nurse expressed surprise at the normality of mine. I had been in the waiting room for two hours, and she had expected it to be higher. Considering where I worked at the time, those two hours of doing nothing had been bliss. I hadn’t had such a relaxing time in years.
Nearly half a century ago, if you had something for Christmas that needed batteries and they weren’t in the box, you were stuffed. Nothing was open, nothing at all, until the day after Boxing Day. Pubs were open on Christmas morning, I know this because my father always went, but you were not going to get your lunch in there. They closed up and threw everyone out in time for lunch.
Shops closed early on Christmas Eve, pubs opened for a few hours Christmas morning, and that was it until the whole shebang was over.
In fact, that was still the case when I was eighteen. I recall getting an impressive model kit for Christmas but no glue, and the shops were all silent.
Flipping back in time again (I’m a Doctor, we’re allowed to do that, it says so on TV) to the mid-sixties when our first TV appeared in the house. It wasn’t often turned on because there weren’t transmissions all day. We’d turn on before the kiddie programs (Watch with Mother, now only available on YouTube) started and we’d stare at the test card. When Bill and Ben, or the Woodentops, or whoever was on that day, finished their few minutes of babble, we turned it off.
The TV was in the kitchen because that was where electrical things lived and it could not be used if the washing machine occupied its mains socket. The only thing running electricity in the living room was the light bulb and the vast Scalextric my father had bought and which didn’t fit anywhere else. Four lanes of it. Mother was not best pleased.
I looked at that house again on Google Streetview. It looks exactly the same, right down to the concrete slab over the front door where Action Man met a terrible end with his parachute, because I’d forgotten about that and threw him a little too hard. He wasn’t fatally wounded, lost a couple of limbs but that just made him an ideal tank driver. My army did not discriminate against the disabled.
All these things, and more, far too many to go into here, taught me something important. It taught me how to wait.
It’s become a forgotten skill. Everyone wants everything right now. I’ve been in airport departure lounges where the flight was delayed by a few hours, shrugged and turned my attention back to either reading or writing a book. All around me were the tuttings and gasps of those whose lives must surely end if they are not at point X by time Y.
When I arrange travel that involves changes, I arrange it to account for possible delays. I never set up any kind of transfer that only gives me a few minutes between arrival and departure. Once, I admit, I did get it wrong and spent a whole night on Preston station in the cold. That was because of a shut-down of most of the East Coast line that sent me into an emergency workaround and I cut it a little bit too fine.
These days we are supposed to have 24/7 availability and time spent sitting on platforms is time wasted. We’ll see about that. I have a mass of photos from a 1978 all-UK rail trip that I plan to put together and sell as a photobook, as soon as I can scan them all. It was two weeks and we only left the rails for one night, so it’s a big box of photos. There are Deltics, 33s, 27s, engines nobody under 30 has ever seen. But I digress again.
That might indeed be the point here. I digress sometimes, drift off into other lines of thought. I don’t stick to the here and now. As a scientist, this has been an enormous advantage because I am not on tram lines. I don’t wear blinkers. I see the interesting thing off to the side and sometimes I follow it and sometimes it leads to a cure for something, using no nasty chemicals at all.
People, even in science, don’t do that any more. They follow a direct path to the end they want to achieve and no distractions are allowed. Funding depends on it. There was a time when they’d say ‘You have this much money’ and just let us loose and we’d invent things and discover things but it’s not like that any more. Now it’s a case of ‘We want you to prove this and if you don’t there’ll be no more money’.
24/7. Results defined by the funders. Instant gratification. Everything is now. Time is all that matters. Delays cannot be accepted. Time spent not earning money is time wasted. Nobody knows how to wait any more. It’s not just technology. It’s a kind of regression, an infantilisation. People act like little kids who have to have what they want right now, and then when they have it, realise they don’t want it at all.
Even Baloo the bear realised this.
Don’t spend your time just looking around for something you want that can’t be found
When you find out you can live without it and go along, not thinking about it.
Even if it can be found, do you need it? Do you need it right now? There is much to be gained by not taking credit cards out with you so you don’t come home, empty your bag and think ‘Why did I buy that?’ The safety net is no more. These days you can order it on the internet at 3 am and get all tetchy if it’s not at your house by 9 am.
I used to order electrical components from a company called Doram, the public face of RS Components. I’d write the order, write a cheque, put it in the post box and maybe a week later it would arrive. Now? Put in an Internet order and it’s two days at the most. No waiting any more because nobody knows how.
Someone asked me if I could produce a photo book for them, a few days ago. Sure, I can do that, when do you want it? Their desired date was yesterday. I said no. I can produce it in that time but to have it printed and delivered will take longer. So they went off in a huff. It wouldn’t take more than a day or two to make such a book if all the photos are already digital but printing and posting takes time.
It all has to be NOW and that is a very recent phenomenon. It’s as if the whole of humanity is regressing into the swamps, into little reptiles who cannot grasp the concept of tomorrow. It has to be now, there is no other time.
Some of us still know how to wait. I have a feeling that it will prove to be a massive advantage.
This is very well observed. In my last job I got a couch for the office and used to close the door and just relax to contemplate some tricky issues. The boss comes in one day and asks me “What do you think you are doing” My reply ‘thinking’ seemed to completely baffle him as every minute must be spent in manic ‘activity’ of some sort.
Anyway some weeks later, we achieve a major triumph and are the first company to do so in that area. This is as a result of the thought process and plan formulation that I’d figured out but still actual thought was eschewed as funny and dangerous, you had to be busy to be useful.
I don’t mind waiting per sé,. For example, I have ordered an 1813 Prussian Gendarm Pistole. Two to three weeks. Good! He makes them when ordered, and does not keep a shelf full, “just incase”.
Five hour delay at Leipzig railstation? (Half planned. We travel with a rail firm that only has two trains per day on Sundays, but it is only a quarter of the DB price. But the event finished early, and our lift to the station needed to get back to Genoa after dropping us off.) NO problem. Last time I filled a memory card on my camera, and had to go and buy a new one. (Which here, is NO problem on a Sunday.)
What DOES bloody annoy though, is the likes of Amazon, who make such a big deal of “next day deliverys”, and then they are not. If it is offered “without delay”, I EXPECT it without delay.
Good post Leg. I don’t know what the original was or who said it but I always encourage and work on ’90% preparation and 10% perspiration’ for any project. The other way round, things might still get done but only in a fashion. Thinking seems to be passé these days. My equivalent of SAOT’s ‘couch’ is an old director’s chair that I’ve trained to follow me around, especially good for summer garden jobs.
In my youth I yearned for a Mamod steam traction engine for Christmas. I got it! The instructions insisted that I should give the piston a dose of 3in1 oil before use, but there was none in the house to be found!
Mum and Dad assured me, with the wisdom of long experience, that there would be no shops open on Christmas day, and I would have to wait They would be right, of course, but I had to try. (I was on the verge of tears!)
Fraser’s bicycle repair shop was open!
Ah, a sweet memory.
(Authority, it turned out, was not always right!)
Fraser (Scottish perchance?) would have known that a lot of new…and not so new…bikes take to the road on Christmas day.
Ah, yes, the Mamod steam engine! A fine piece of engineering for a young lad. Personally, I took the attitude that the amount of use it would get before I could purchase some 3in1 was minimal, so a bit of cooking oil was drafted in to cover during the interim. Luckily there was some meths in the garage, so the Meccano set got a good workout and my parents got some peace and quiet.
I was never very good at waiting…
I too remember Christmases when everything closed down. On the other hand, due to the Lympics, ASDA opened at 9:00am today, and hardly anyone was there! It … was … awesome!
Interesting post Leggy.
Go to the docs with one thing and come out with at least another two. It’s a sad world indeed.
Patience? Probably a lost art.
My Dad used to have to work mornings on Xmas day. I used to do my paper round on Xmas day too. Nothing much was open and not for long. But that was in Scotland. New Year was HUGE back then. Parties for days afterwards.
Shockingly I found myself in the model train aisle at a hobby shop last week. Okay my wife was in getting stuff for her work. I went to see these tiny wee trains you like. They had wee people and some buildings and tracks but no trains.
Well, looking at the prices on the latest ones, and considering how ‘pocketable’ they are, I bet they are all behind the counter now!
Patience is a lost virtue. I have it most of the time. I am patient when I know what i’m doing will result in the inevitable delay, and I’m prepared for it. I bring a book with me whilst commuting, and I leave cushions of time for slowness of others. All this hurry around, rush rush is bad for your health. It is good to just sit and think, but you have to pretend your busy, or the boss will think you’re “goofing off”. No wonder everything is in such a mess.
Maybe, LI, PATIENCE is not the desirable thing in this age. Maybe SELF-DISCIPLINE is what is required.
Patience suggests simply waiting, which was OK in the past when communications and delivery were known and assumed to have a delay element. But now we have to give ourselves time to evaluate things, which requires self-discipline. We are mentally bombarded with ‘do it NOW’ adverts on the TV, and ‘think this NOW’ adverts (aka ‘press releases’) by the Holy Zealots of Tobacco Control.
Frank Davis has found the elusive word for us smokers to describe ourselves with – we are VERMIN; disgusting, filthy, stinking VERMIN. ‘Desert rats’, in other words.
I was born in the Chinese Year of the Rat, so I’m not at all troubled by being called ‘vermin’.
I absolutely refuse to be rushed or to rush anywhere these days. I try to plan ahead so that I don’t end up late for things, but if I find for any reason that I am running late, then that’s just the way it is. I don’t then suddenly start trying to do everything at double-speed – is the world really going to stop turning just because I get a later train? Will the seasons swap their order if I arrive at a friend’s house a bit later than planned? Will the sky fall in if I and my OH turn up as “late arrivals to the party?” Almost certainly not, so why worry? If something is really time-critical then I plan to get there early to take account of unexpected delays and then, if the delays don’t happen I have a bit of time at my destination to relax and wait around a bit.
Ditto at work. The present e-mail culture has inspired a sort of “Me! Me! Me!” psychology. People seem to think that just because their message has got through much more quickly than it might have done with, say, snail mail, then for some reason responding to it will be quicker, too. Where did that logic come from? What makes them think that sending a request by e-mail also makes putting together a price list, or looking up information for a reply, or coming to a decision on something somehow will somehow be quicker as well? Anyone who has the temerity to e-mail me, and then to call me an hour later to ask if their e-mail has arrived because “they haven’t had a reply yet,” gets told in no uncertain terms that stopping whatever I was doing to take their call has not only meant that I can’t at the same time be addressing the concerns in their e-mail, but also that I can’t be addressing the concerns in everyone else’s e-mails, too – and if they were all to call an hour after sending an e-mail to me then no-one would ever get a reply! That usually sends them away with their tail between their legs and they don’t try and harrass me into “putting them at the top of the pile” again. Can’t think why not … And, no, we’ve never lost a customer because of it, because I do get back to them – usually within 24 hours (or 48 at most), and often receive in return an e-mail back from them “thanking me for my prompt reply.” People just need to be told, like the impatient children that they have become to: “Just. Wait.” as indeed my own mother used to say to me when I was an impatient child. And 99 times out of 100, they will.