It’s really amazing where inspiration comes from sometimes. There I was having a Facebook conversation with Zoom yesterday, when suddenly I thought of something that needed discussing.
Patience.
I have none.
Those of you who know me will find this hard to believe given my calm, almost Zen-like outward demeanor, but it’s true.
You know that question they sometimes ask you at job interviews about your flaws? I always say I’m incredibly impatient. But then I try to parlay that into a virtue by going on about how this means I get things done. How I’m tenacious when it comes to getting answers to questions; finding information that needs to be found ; finishing things that need to be finished. How I do things right the first time because I don’t have the patience to do things twice. I guess it works because people keep giving me jobs.
One day someone’s going to discover there’s an actual impatience syndrome or impatience birth defect or something and I will finally be vindicated.
Meanwhile I just seem like an ass when I roll my eyes and say, “get on with it already”, when someone tells a long-winded story or takes forever to get to the point in a discussion.
Or when I twitch, squirm, jump up and down and sigh loudly in queues.
Or tear at my hair or slide out of my chair at meetings because the discussion is just going around and around and around in circles.
Or start feeling really agitated and start pacing furiously in doctors’ or dentists’ or hospital waiting rooms making my way closer and closer to their inner sanctum until someone finally gets nervous enough to let me see the doctor I had an appointment to see hours ago.
Or call someone constantly to see if they’ve finished the thing yet that they promised to finish ages ago.
Or wanting to pull your own internal organs through your own throat rather than play a board game.
Or try actually to physically push cars or buses or trains into moving faster by rocking violently back and forth or yelling, “Come on!! Let’s go!!”
Or wishing pointedly and vocally that everyone would stop shilly-shallying, dilly-dallying, dithering, dawdling, vacillating, prevaricating, quibbling, equivocating, and eff-rucking around.
XUP 