where time stands still

i’m pretty sure the laboratory at my doctor’s office exists in the same kind of weird time loop as the island in LOST.

because no matter what i day of the week i go, no matter what time of year, no matter what time of day, no matter how busy or empty its waiting area... i always wind up sitting there for almost exactly 40 minutes before i’m called in, poked and released.

this morning, i had to swing by for some routine blood work. i opted to go relatively early – after rush hour but (hopefully) before a backlog formed at the lab – in the hopes of trimming my wait time to maybe 20 minutes or less. i arrived just before 9:30am, and saw a handful of people already waiting... each one sort of heaped in a chair, requisition form and number (think: the kind of take-a-number number you’d get at a bakery) in hand, checking the time and sighing. clearly, this was going to be a slow process. per usual.

so, i pulled my little number from its wheel-like dispenser and sat down.

and waited.

there were three people ahead of me. i figured even if each one took a very-generous 10 minutes, i should be in and out in just over a half-hour. and, really, a blood test doesn’t (or shouldn’t) take 10 minutes.

time crawled past.

s-l-o-w-l-y.

one by one, the folks preceding me got up, went in and came out.

i looked at the clock – almost 30 minutes had passed.

good grief, this place really DOES exist in its own freaky time loop.

thankfully, when i was finally called in, i saw that my favourite lab tech was on duty. i like her because she’s warm and friendly and her work never, ever leaves an unsightly bruise afterward. she even gives me tiny “button” band-aids from her secret stash so that i don’t have to walk out with that tell-tale cotton ball held in place with the world’s biggest strip of medical tape.

sure enough, she did her thing – three vials today! – and was jovial and chatty... even when her fellow tech accidentally bumped into my chair (while the needle was still in my arm). no apology, no “sorry, i hope that didn’t cause the needle to slip!”

so my tech kind of rolled her eyes and chuckled. then patched me up and sent me on my way.

i looked at the clock on my way out.

it had been 40 minutes.