#collaborate
anywhere you happen to be

One of the most annoying things is waiting. You have a doctor’s appointment at 4:40 P.M. and you find yourself being number 65 with quite a queue before you. You were on time but you will be seen one hour after the time of your scheduled appointment.

Monday I went for a doctor’s visit and I found myself in this exact situation. A long time ago, in waiting rooms, people would read, usually celebrity gossip or car magazines, because gender is still gender.

Today the scenario is different, the waiting is cheated by smartphones: on Facebook we post photographs of the number of the current patient being examined and we comment that there are still 15 people before it will be our turn, on Instagram we post a worried looking selfie and off with the hashtags: #waiting #healthservicemalfunction…, two people chatting on WhatsApp, someone playing Hearthstone, someone else reading a cooking blog. Killing time basically.

I worked, the other day, almost as if I were in the office.

Not because I am a workaholic, but because my colleague Elena needed to send out a letter and she needed my help.

If this were to have taken place 5 years ago, I would have been pacing around the waiting room, speaking loudly on the phone, paying for the call myself, naturally, telling her: “go to the top, at the left, what do you see? Good, click there. What does the computer tell you? …” all this taking up a great amount of time just to get to the bottom of the issue.

The other day, chatting silently, without disturbing the elderly people in a wait-induced drowsiness, we were able to resolve everything in just a few minutes thanks to a shared document. I received a phone call to my usual extension number and I sent a virtual post-it to another colleague, reminding him of a call he would have to make in a few minutes.

It was finally my turn and, getting up from my chair, I closed the Wildix Smartphone App, walked towards the doctor’s office, happy to have given a sense to the wait.