Dawdling
I think that I am the only person on the face of the earth that still uses the word “dawdle.” For years, the word has experienced a long slow creeping extinction due to the use of much fancier words such as loiter, plod, dally, and the ever popular “time waster.” But that’s okay. I aim to keep using this word, and if my own children’s lack of urgency is any indicator of what I am going to be yelling at them for the next few years until they reach adulthood and get out of here, they will probably use the word on their kids as well. It works that way. My dad used to say “wound up like an eight day clock” when I was acting like a spaz and now I find myself using that same phrase when I need to calm down my spastic kids.
Dawdlers are a group of people that are particularly and habitually maddening to me.
Why? I don’t know. I really don’t have someplace to be, but if I do want to go, get the hell out of my way, you are wasting my precious time! It’s true, for the most part; none of us has “someplace to be” that is so urgent we have to drive like idiots or mow people down with shopping carts in the store, yet we do just those things. Goddamnit, I am busy! I don’t think it’s true, I don’t think you really are busy. I sure as hell know that I’m not. It’s more like you want people to think you are busy and that you are important.
So is being infuriated by dawdlers an egotistical exaggeration? Are we attempting to enhance ourselves by acting like convulsive apes when somebody jumps in front of us in the ten items or less line and they have seventeen packs of gum? I think so. Overdoing things is part of modern life now-a-days.
There are several ways I can go forward with this, linking how rage can be enlarged to the point of shooting up a high school, or stabbing a fiancé but I don’t really want to go that far with this. I want to talk about my type of rage. My average, normal, everyday type of fury that I feel bursting inside me when threatened by delays and I am sure you are guilty of this sort of anger just as much as I am. I’ve seen it in the faces of people waiting in lines or in the frustrated glances at the clock in the dentist’s waiting room. We all react like this.
Just as you and I are guilty of this sort of behavior, we are also guilty of not having to be some place right now. It’s true; how often does it mean life or death if you don’t make it to work on time or miss the first five minutes of a movie? In the end, those wasted minutes are forgotten by the day’s end, but right up until you achieve your goal those minutes are like creeping poison on the brain.
Yes, yes, I know that there are occupations and circumstances out there that require exact timing, but how frequently do you really run into them? I highly doubt that I am writing this out and it is being viewed by ambulance drivers or brain surgeons…and even those guys don’t need to be everyplace on the split second.
Speaking of doctors, I recently was in the hospital for a three day stay. I didn’t know at the time when I entered the emergency room that I was going to be staying for more than a few hours, but as it turns out that was not the case. The whole stay has no bearing on what I want to relate, but the sluggish and unhurried time I spent in pain waiting for the emergency room employees to respond to my emergency does.
Have you ever been to the emergency room? It is an exercise in senseless and ineffective bureaucracy. First you have to fill out forms, probably bleeding on them from your wounds as you provide your insurance information. Next, you have to “hurry up and wait.” I really like that phrase, it exemplifies exactly my whole point when it comes to dawdling. It is a very old saying that has its origins in the military, and who can argue with common grunts when it comes to pointing out the obvious? I do not know what was more agonizing, the actual pain I was in from my ailment, or the syrupy slow time I spent looking at old ripped up copies of Better Homes & Gardens while I passed the time waiting for somebody to treat me.
Finally, they get you into a small curtained off area of the emergency room and the nurses and doctors (who are definitely not dawdlers) swoop down on your gowned form. The prod, stick, pump, and test you in a blurring matter of seconds and then they swoop off to their next unsuspecting victim. If it weren’t for courtesy they treat you with while they are inspecting you, you might figure you had just been the victim of some sort of sexual assault. Then you see the bill they send you and you know you’ve just been raped.
So yeah, in some cases anger at dawdling and plodding might be considered productive and necessary to getting things done. But as I have said, these cases are rare and (almost) nobody goes to the emergency room every day. Even if a person did do that sort of thing, I would think it went hand in hand with what we were discussing earlier: that people overdo things in an attempt to become more important in their minds. To aggrandize themselves.
Note: are there scientific or medical reasons for dawdling?
