Waiting Rooms | A 5-Minute FreeWrite

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hlezama4 years agoPeakD2 min read

The good thing about magazines was that they used to help us figure out how good a doctor was.

Waiting Rooms

The good thing about magazines was that they used to help us figure out how good a doctor was. You could tell just by looking at the dates and variety of the magazines in the waiting room. They were intended to satisfy any patient’s fancy.

A good doctor did not spare resources to keep their growing clientele entertained. A good recent magazine minimized the impact of the bill. Sometimes a good recent magazine made you forget that the money spent was actually wasted because either there was nothing wrong with you or the doctor was unable to diagnose your problem.

Now that magazines are gone, along with newspapers and television, there is no way to gamble from the waiting rooms. Now desolated, waiting rooms are even more sterile and stale; decorated with pictures that seem to have been sold by the same itinerant copyist, they feel like empty shells where ghost echoes of animated conversations and children’s laughter and cries ricochet and vanish. You can rarely find other patients to gossip with or ask for references. You just have to trust your guts.

I enter and leave several rooms until I find one with magazines. They are dusty National Geographic, Mecánica Popular, Muy Interesante, Cosmopolitan, Life, Tú, Ronda, Estampas and Todo en Domingo (reminders of how good newspapers were), even one 1998 issue of Sports Illustrated. Some of the pages are torn or missing. This got to be a good doctor. At least he or she (or whatever they is) values nostalgia.