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Funny People do weird things
[ 3 minute read ]
I got into a few conversations yesterday in the Doctor's surgery waiting room. I tend to make that happen. I am uncomfortable with silence. Oh, I recognise that people are miserable when they are waiting to see a doctor; they wouldn't be there otherwise, would they? Imagine a conversation in a home that went something like this:
'You should get that seen to.'
'What? Get what seen to?'
'That smile. It seems to be getting bigger.'
'I know! I'm getting delighted about it. Does it show that much?'
'Well, I 'm thinking that the neighbours are shying away from us. You know, since Covid, people tend to keep their distances if they suspect they might catch something.'
'I will make a doctor's appointment.'
*
After a couple of the regular patients mercilessly watched me squirt my trousers with the weird spout of the hand sanitiser and they outrageously laughed, and chuckled, 'I didn't have time to warn you!' I sat back down and then made way for a wheelchair-bound woman and her husband. This meant I slid along a seat, right next to a silent woman. When another patient passed through the room he spoke to her and she replied with a croaky voice; clearly she had a sore throat. Eventually, we spoke to one another and I told her that before the Covid pandemic I would have moved away from her. In fact, I told her, I would not have moved away or even thought of do it, before the outbreak. Somehow I have been programmed to distance myself from people with any symptom of a Coronavirus or common cold. She, of course, made a shooing hand gesture and said that I should move away then. I didn't. Instead, I explained to her about my experiments in acting (to myself) as though I had a phobia of germs in public for six months to see if I would ever go back to my 'usual' dirty and nonchalant self after the experiment. I told her that I never did ignore potential contamination when I finished the experiment, as I once did. I told her that I had to fight my brain-washed brain and override the urge to move away from her. I told her that many people already feeling rough might be miserable to discover that people shun them simply because they wipe their nose or cough. I said I wouldn't do that. We chatted for a while before I was called.
Unlike other patients that day, I went into the doctor's office smiling and came out scowling. Her back-handed compliment gave me pause, 'You are clever. You are really clever. It is difficult to tell whether you have an agenda that is different to the one you present to me,' Did she just accuse me of being manipulative? Looking at my invisible map of social interaction I saw an area that said, 'There be dragons', meaning monsters lie in the deep waters there; beware. I left her fishing trip hanging and said nothing.
Weirdly, the person I got direction from, to get to the surgery was a bit strange. He said something like, 'If you was coming from the other way the surgery would be on your left.'
People can be so funny sometimes.