Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Angry at the doctor's office

So I had the wonderful experience of spending half an hour in the waiting room of a doctor's office today. My first big question is how do doctors manage to be running late five fucking minutes after the day starts? Why do I ever bother showing up on time for appointments? There's ALWAYS a half hour wait.

At least this doctor's office has good magazines. I passed the time by reading The New Yorker. All right, I'll be honest: I passed the time time by reading the cartoons in the New Yorker. About 20 minutes into my wait I noticed something weird about a woman sitting opposite me. Every time I looked up she was in exactly the same position, hunched over and writing furiously in a notebook. And I mean EXACTLY the same position.

Normal people move occasionally.

A few minutes later, the answer started to reveal itself. I was reading when I noticed a weird noise. It's a little hard to describe, it was a whiny, squeaky sound. After a while I realised it wasn't going away and looked up to see what it was. And I was greeted by the sight of this... dude. Said dud was wearing white track suit pants. And nothing else. And he was bent over, presenting me with a disturbing amount of arse crack.

Let me explain a little. This doctor's office is in St Kilda which is a rather seedy area of Melbourne. So while it has nice beachfront and expensive real estate, it also has lots of junkies and hookers. The situation was now becoming clear. The obsessive tendencies of ice addicts tended to explain sitting lady's weird behaviour. Now it seemed as if some little druggie domestic dilemma was being played out for a full waiting room's enjoyment.

Actually, I have to hand it to the junkies. They kept it quiet. It never got to be more than this weird, muted whining. Anyway, after a few minutes Arse-Out-Of-Track-Suit-Pants man left and crazy lady went back to her weird behaviour. She was now apparently bored with sitting still and scurried around obsessively tidying up the magazines (more classic ice user behaviour).

In retrospect, I'm sorry I didn't get her number before she left. I hate cleaning up my own place and I think that job would have kept her occupied for hours. And she wouldn't have stopped until everything was organised into neat piles, even if it meant not sleeping for 72 hours.

These really were considerate junkies, though. They stayed quiet (if weird) while in the waiting room. When crazy lady eventually went outside to meet up with arse man they spent a lot of time trying to attract the attention of someone called Paul. By which I mean they spent 10 minutes in the middle of a busy road screaming "PAAAAAAUUUUUULLLLLLL!!!!!"

I have no idea why Paul didn't rush out to meet them.

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