‘ve spent a fair bit of time waiting in various doctors and hospital waiting rooms over the past six months so it was easy to get into the mood of this new cover illustration for S. C. Lees short story ‘The Waiting Room.’
Find out more about the short story at the authors website* or buy the story direct from Amazon.
The image doesn’t address the biggest scourge of these places for me personally though, which is the recent addition of televisions into them.
I think it all started with chinese take aways you know, for years these places were the only waiting areas where, in a small and cheap way, some effort was made to make your ten minutes of waiting go by that much quicker. Ten years on and banks and hospital waiting areas have followed suit. My own bank prefers News 24, and seems to think being force fed the days news, whilst overhearing everyone else’s business at the desks to the left, is an acceptable alternative to employing enough people to sit at the counters… and don’t get me started on the useless extra person they seem to employ just to walk up and down the que asking if anyone has cheques to pay in.
Hospitals seem to have a more open, and individual choice as to what can be shown. Most A&E’s seem to go for ITV, especially in the daytime – as close to my own personal fifth circle of hell as I like to get being forced to watch Jeremy Kyle in such an environment. However on one recent occasion, sat in a hospital waiting room, CBeebies kicked in and due to the more noisy nature of the programme, the nurse came over and switched us all over to something more inoffensive; BBC One’s Diagnosis Murder, that days episode it turned out featured a nurse who was murdering the patients…
Anyway, I’ve gone on a bit much here. I’m not quite sure what distractions Edward has as he waits and waits, I guess if you want to know you’ll just have to read the story…
*Site no longer online.
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