People In Waiting Rooms

People in waiting rooms are always pretty strange to me. I guess I’m not sociable enough. Some people are so voluble that they nearly seem rabid to me. My last visit to the doctor there was a man who talked ceaselessly, mostly to the woman he was sitting next to. She showed so little interest in him that I thought she was a disinterested stranger who only answered him at all out of politeness, but as it turned out she was his long-suffering wife who just didn’t talk much. I guess she’d long ago given up on getting her turn. At one point he found “a really great cartoon” in one of the magazines and tried to engage nearly everyone in the waiting room in his attempt to share it. At the time, it would have just made me irritable as I couldn’t see well enough and didn’t want to make conversation with a stranger about why I couldn’t.

Also present that day in the waiting room were two couples, and it turned out that the wives had long decades ago been childhood friends and next-door neighbors, though they hadn’t seen one another in years. There was nothing objectionable about their reunion, of course, though I would just as well not have heard every single word of it! Some people do everything at full volume and without restraint, I don’t know why.

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