Notes for an Essay on Waiting Rooms – Jamie Todd Rubin

Recently I found myself in a waiting room, and while there, waiting, it occurred to me that someone should write an essay on waiting rooms. Since I always have a notebook at hand, I took some notes, and here they are, for anyone who would like to write the essay.

1. The Lit Review

What have others written about waiting rooms? Not much, so far as I can tell. Plenty that is written takes place in waiting rooms, and much of that, I imagine, is read in waiting rooms–or at least, it used to be–see #3 below. There are poems about waiting rooms. See Elizabeth Bishop's “In the Waiting Room” for just one example.

I've read a lot of stuff over the years and I can't believe that not much has been written about waiting room. Waiting, sure. Vladimir and Estragon famously waited for Godot, but he never showed up. I once saw a play off Broadway in New York called “Line” where a bunch of people waited in a line. Godot didn't show up there either.

I couldn't recall E. B. White having written anything about waiting rooms, although he wrote a lot about other forms of waiting–for cows to calve, for snow to melt, for the mail to arrive. Still, I was certain that everyone's favorite grumpy old man, Andy Rooney, must have written about waiting rooms. When I returned home I ransacked my library and in a 1987 mass market paperback¹ of Rooney's Word for Word, I found his essay “Waiting Rooms”. He begins:

One of the reasons everyone would like to be a king or president is that he wouldn't have to sit around the waiting room in a doctor's office. If you're either of those, the doctor takes you right away.

Given that this essay was first published sometime in 1984, 1985, or 1986, according to the copyright page of the book, and given that the literary landscape seems barren of waiting room essays, the time is ripe for a new one.

2. The Experience

Here are some notes from my recent experiences in waiting rooms, and I'm writing them out in such a way as to ensure a sale to the New Yorker's “Talk of the Town” or Harper's “Readings”:

• The waiting room that I waited in had eight other people besides me. There was an elderly couple who spoke what sounded like a sonorous Spanish in mild whispers.

• Four empty chairs down the wall from them was an even elderlier² couple, the woman hardy, the man rail thin and with a raspy whisper of a voice.

• There were two stand-alones: people waiting by themselves rather than with a companion, which makes a sort of logical sense. Why waste double the time? One sat along a half wall that separated this segment of the waiting room from the other segments. The other sat two chairs to my left.

• Did I mention that the waiting room was so large it was divided into four segments? When you checked into your appointment, you were told which segment to go to–that's where you'd be called from. I was not called from the segment I was assigned to, and when they called me they used my last name rather than my first name, which always confuses me for some reason.

• Rounding off the eight waiters³ was a mother-son pair. The son, whose name was Mike, was called four times before he finally copped to being the Mike in question.

• Seven of the eight waiters, waited with smart phones in hand. The eighth–the wife who spoke in sonorous Spanish–had no phone but looked over her husband's shoulder, and in those hushed, sonorous tones, rebuked his various taps and swipes.

• I alone, the odd ninth person in the room, had no phone out, but rather a (trade) paperback, a No. 2 pencil, and a Field Notes notebook into which I scribbled the heading: “Notes for an Essay on Waiting Rooms.”

3. The Historical Angle

The essay on waiting rooms might pivot to the question of how have waiting rooms changed over time? I imagine there is some rich landscape here. A few possible toys to play with:

• When I was a kid, waiting rooms always seemed to have some sort of toy to play with. There were those Rube-Goldberg-looking contraptions on which you would slide various pieces around thin pipes with sharp bends this way and that. If a waiting room had one of those, I stopped waiting and started playing.

• Magazines used to fill waiting room tables. I used to wonder if the owner of the waiting room subscribed to all of these magazines individually–what a job that would be!–or if there was some kind of waiting room magazine subscription service. This might be an interesting angle for the piece, and turn it into investigative journalism, rather than “Talk of the Town”.

• You could tell a lot about the tastes of the waiting room waiters from the state of the magazines on the table. Time was often well-worn. Ditto Newsweek. Ditto Golf Digest. Ditto Field & Stream. National Geographic was generally in pristine condition. Back in those days, Time had real articles by real writers and not the listicles that infest almost every issue today.

• The waiting room I waited in circa 30 June 2026 had no magazines. In fact, it had no tables, a table being a useless luxury in a waiting room sans magazines to put on them.

• Since then, I have been in three other waiting rooms. In two of the three, I was the only one with a paper book, the only one not looking at a phone, the only one, perhaps, who was proud of this fact. Maybe the piece on waiting rooms can really be a piece on those eccentric people who buck the tide and don't pull out their phones in waiting rooms–and feel both superior and ashamed at the same time.

• The other waiting room was in an auto body shop⁴. That waiting room was not so much a waiting room as a waiting corner. Perhaps the piece could discuss different waiting “spaces” in general: From the waiting room, to the waiting corner, down to the waiting alcove.

• This particular waiting corner had two sofas at right angles to one another. The sofas looked like they were picked up curbside on a deserted street, but they were surprisingly comfortable. In front of them was a completely mismatched wagon-wheel table topped with magazines that may have dated back to the 1960s, or at least the early 1970s. I think I caught an ad for Eastern Airlines. Perhaps the piece can focus on the cultural archaeology of waiting rooms.

I've now run out of notes for an essay on waiting rooms. I hope that someone will take up this gauntlet and run with it. In fact, I'm certain someone out there will. So if this is something you are interested in pursuing, I have two words for you:

Don't wait.