One day, week before last, I had a 3:45 appointment with a highly-recommended specialist in what ails me at the moment. And let me assure you all that I'm fine, the problem is not serious and it's already well on its way to not being a problem any longer. That's not what this is about.
Here's what it's about. I got there at 3:15, filled out forms and sat in the waiting room as patient after patient went in before me for appointments that were supposed to commence well before I got there. No one explained the delay to me but I heard snatches of conversation. The doctor, it seems, had gotten involved in an emergency surgery elsewhere that morning and was several hours tardy getting to his office and to the list of appointments that awaited him there.
Okay, that happens. But as I sat there waiting, I started to get annoyed by this thought: By Noon or 1 PM, his staff knew that once he got to this office, he was going to run at least ninety minutes behind for the rest of the day. They could have called me then and told me I could come at 5:00 or offered me the chance to reschedule for another day.
They didn't. And when I signed in, no one said, "It'll be at least an hour and a half before he sees you." I could have gone out and gotten something to eat. I could have gone to the shopping mall down the street for an hour. I could even have gone home and come back.
This kind of thing will change. Any day now, someone will invent an app where if I have this kind of an appointment, I can log in and get a realistic, continuously-updated estimate of when my appointment will actually happen. I mean, I can log into the Olive Garden app right now and find out what kind of a delay there will be before I can be seated there. We'll have this soon for appointments for professional services.
So I sat in the waiting room from 3:15 until about 5:00 at which time they showed me into an examining room, giving me false hope that I would be seeing the doctor within moments. Nope. I sat in that examining room for…well, after twenty minutes, I was starting to get pretty annoyed.
My cell phone rang and I took a call from a lady I know. I happened to tell her where I was and how long and I'd been waiting…and she got even madder than I was. She told me I shouldn't allow myself to be treated like that. I should get up and march right out of that office, pausing only to tell the staff of my outrage. "Your time is too valuable," she said…she was right. My time is valuable…
…which is why I didn't do what she suggested.
Oh, I thought about it. I gave myself a time limit: "If the doctor doesn't see me by 5:30, I'm going to walk out and tell them why I'm walking out!" But then at 5:30, I came to my senses and didn't walk out. I just sat there and at 5:37, the doctor came in and apologized profusely for the delay. We then settled down to discuss why I was there and when I walked out of there fifteen minutes later, I had been helped a lot and my problem was, as I said above, already well on its way to not being a problem any longer.
And here is what this post is really about: I have lately observed a number of cases where friends of mine got angry about some way in which they were wronged or felt they'd been wronged. Those are not the same thing but they felt wronged and they got angry and they did something that harmed them even more. I'm going to go back and put that last phrase in boldface because it's key to what I'm saying here. It was like they got mad and said, "You hurt me so I'm going to hit my own head with this baseball bat. That'll show you!"
I am more and more conscious of how this happens and how I've sometimes done it to myself. I don't do it often because I don't get mad that often but I am aware that the actions we take when angry, sometimes are quite self-destructive.
Example: I had a friend who was paying $1750 a month rental on his apartment. His rent was raised to $1800 and he blew up at the landlord, called him names and announced he was moving out of that overpriced shithole. What was the outcome? Well, the landlord had no trouble renting the room to a new tenant, probably for more than $1800. Meanwhile, my friend went through the hassle of finding a new place and moving…and the cheapest apartment he found was $1810 for not as big or as nice an apartment.
Yeah, he sure showed that landlord, didn't he?
Lately, I see this thing occurring time after time. There are moments when anger is justified and perhaps even effective…but often it is neither and you just wind up making things worse for yourself.
In the case of my doctor visit, if I'd walked out, I might not have been able to get another appointment with this specialist, My regular physician sent me to him because he thought this guy was the best in the business at solving problems like mine. It was tough to get the appointment and the next opening might have been months off. He's very busy and certainly would not have missed having me as a patient.
I might have wound up waiting two weeks to go to someone not as good…and going to that appointment, filling out the New Patient forms, waiting for that doctor to be able to see me, having the consultation and going home might have taken two hours. It might have taken more. By not letting my anger control the situation…by not seizing on some momentary feeling of punching back, I got good help seven minutes later.
Yes, I should not have had to wait close to two hours for a fifteen-minute appointment but I couldn't do anything about that. My only choices were to stay or go and I think "stay" was the right option for me, whereas "go" would have been like that baseball bat thing I mentioned.
And I guess the reason I don't get mad very often is that I've learned it usually causes me to do the wrong thing. That's something I need to remember for my own good. You might want to think about whether it would help you to remember it too.