I am very Patient, but waiting is awful

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

I consider myself a very patient person. If there is a reason to wait. If I don’t know why I am waiting – if it seems unfair, or uncalled for, or just unexplained, I can get quite frustrated.

I was at Woodbury Middle School last Friday and my classroom faced the front of the building. When 6th hour started (the last hour of the day. It is 53 minutes long), I happened to glance out the window and saw a line of cars had already started – waiting to pick up their student(s) after school. It was almost an hour before the first student would walk out the door, yet when I craned my neck a little, I could see there were at least 7 cars already waiting.

Huh.

When I used to have to wait for my kids – drop them off at an activity and then wait for them to be finished as it was too far from home to make any sense driving home and back – I LOVED it. I call it forced waiting, and it is terrific. You are completely free from all requirements during forced waiting – you get to just sit and do whatever you brought along to do. It is terrific (I guess you have to decide it is terrific. I certainly did).

Coming an hour early to get a good spot in the line is not forced waiting to me. I certainly hope the waiters are doing something more fun and creative than scrolling through their phones (if that is their choice of fun, then I guess it’s okay – but I hope they don’t show up and think, “Oh, nothing to do but scroll.” That would just be sad). Forced waiting requires that you are already there because you dropped the kid off. Showing up early is….I don’t know…icky. It’s just waiting. I hate waiting.*

School gets out at 2:26. By the time I leave at 2:35-2:40, everyone is gone. There are no more waiters. Come later, people! Make the kid wait.

Anyway, when I left Middleton Elementary today school had half an hour left (I go between buildings for the teacher I was subbing for), but there were already ten cars waiting. I could see the buses pulling out from Lake Middle next door and I wondered if they would all be gone and out of my way by the time I got on the road (they were). As I was getting into my car, I saw some middle schoolers come around the piles of snow and start walking across the elementary school parking lot. It made sense – they were walking home…until they weren’t! There was a big SUV parked in the lot and 5 boys got inside and the driver took off! EXCELLENT work around! They were not in the elementary school line – they weren’t in the middle school line – and they were off and moving before the buses even left the lot. I like to think the driver had been there fewer than 3 minutes. Yay!

To sum up – I will wait forever if it is reasonable, but if I can figure out a workaround, I am WINNING!

*movie quote