Violating Personal Space
Waiting Productively
About 65 strangers in a waiting room. Babies playing with mommy’s iPhone. Grandpa hollering to the lady next to him about knee replacement surgery—she doesn’t care but he talks on. Dozens of fingers plying smartphone apps like keyboards, though no music is produced. A lovely, coiffed Black lady in light linen trousers and apricot sweater top, stylish leather shoes with kitten heels and expensive gold jewelry reads a novel and sips from her BPH-free water bottle. Some sleep. Others tap their feet to unheard beats. Anxiety and boredom will do that.
I look at the faces of these folks crammed just like me in a large room waiting for someone to look at my insurance card and auto registration and ask me for money. They aren’t as concerned with observation as I. I wonder at the personal space that we violate by sitting so close together in plastic chairs that the facilities engineer moved into this configuration last night while vacuuming. If anyone came this close to me in any other situation, I’d probably glare first and move away. I can smell the sweat mingled with perfume of the lady next to me as if it’s my own.
Phones ring and entire conversations (rather, one-side of an entire conversation) are conducted in this room. Others strike up a conversation just to pass the time. No desire to socialize is quite produced like that of a waiting room. First the length of the line, then the weather ( “…it’s nice to have the humidity below 75%, isn’t it?”), followed by the nature of the blue plastic chair seat against the rather too-padded seats of the waiting room occupants.
The state worker calls out a number that is now within 20 of my own and I feel a strange sense of accomplishment. I’ve been here too long. Everyone in this room needs to be here but wants to be someplace else…just like me. Children romp. Children fall and cry. Now they call out a number within 7 of the crumpled “96” that’s melting in my fist.
Now I hear multiple languages. Spanish. And a Slavic version I cannot identify. Sorry Mom. I should be able to discern the origins of her language, but my Russian classes and my childhood Macedonian only permit me to know that it’s a Slavic relative. Nothing more.
89. Close enough to wonder whether I should put this computer down and pay attention. Should the number called not have a corresponding and obvious assertion of physical effort, then the clerk moves on to the next number. Move fast old lady! Don’t lose your spot.
But the children in the row in front of me are rambunctious as their mother’s attention is diverted at the counter. They are talking and dancing and crying and wiggling enough to distract the clerk who is calling out the next number. The numbers move too quickly and now two different parties hesitate—tired and anxious—in front of the impatient clerk.
91. Now it’s time to conclude. It took more than 45 minutes to go through 62 numbers. Now it’s my turn to give the state money.
Later someone will push the plastic chairs into the same formation while vacuuming the floor of the flotsam of today’s queue. Tomorrow more perfume and conversations will pass between waiting strangers who violate each other’s personal space.
