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Planning ahead to hurry up and wait
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
While going through my calendars for the next six months, marking the follow-up dental appointments, car tune-ups, three-month-out dinner reservations and checking our vacation plans that were made last year at this time, I suddenly realized that life has become about as spontaneous as an authentic Egyptian pyramid.
When my mother died last year we had to wait over 30 days to have her memorial service, as all the halls and meeting rooms had been booked months in advance. Only a last moment cancellation saved us from holding mom's final tribute on the parking lot at the Plymouth dealership.
Rental cars must be reserved, and some restaurants now not only need reservations but also issue pagers once you arrive, because the wait may take a few hours and they don't want to lose you in the crush.
Even the simple things in life require preplanning of the most detailed kind. When my son decides to eat that chocolate and pistachio cone out in the hot sun while still in his baseball uniform pants, I am not faced with just laundry anymore- now I have to plan to pretreat the stains. Pretreating requires that I first use the stain remover on in "inconspicuous location" on the fabric to guarantee it won't either eat a hole in it like Mothra, or turn the white polyester an unfashionable shade of puce. While neither is acceptable for baseball games, I'd rather not have to spend an evening testing the pretreatment before we can actually wash it. In moments such as these I wish for animal hides and a rushing river bank. At least then the choices would be minimal: pound it with one rock or two.
I cannot just bake cookies anymore when we feel the need for a hot treat. I have to preheat the oven for even the simplest cookie dough, which usually means that we turn it on to warm up, get sidetracked, and end up with the oven left on, unnoticed, for a day and a half, until the heat becomes unbearable.
I can't just jump in my car to go anywhere in the mornings, I have to warm it up for a good five minutes before I put her in gear or she croaks on me.
A couple of weeks ago, we couldn't even just color Easter eggs. After boiling (in advance) I had to wait for them to warm up to room temperature when we took them out of the fridge before we could dip and paint and crack and glue on the little pastel devils.
When a woman wants to color her hair, she has to do a "pretest' the day before (according to instructions) on a small strip of skin, to make sure no allergic reactions or unusual colors occur. You would think by now, 40 years after Clairol invented the term "clown colors" that they would have the burning pigment problem under control. Spray painting your car is still easier (and safer) than touching up the gray.
It's the same when my son gets sick. Taking his temperature still takes a good three minutes. And in these days of electronic deposits and instant cash back there is still a 24 hour wait on clearing funds for use when you put money in the bank.
This preplanning stuff gets to be old quick, and takes years off the average life span. Just the thermometer wait time works out to 11.46 hours lost (that's 396 minutes in my life at just 3 colds per year for myself, 63 minutes for my son and a 50 percent misread do-over rate) in my life waiting for the mercury to move down the little hollow tube. That's enough time to have read War and Peace. If you have 3 or 4 kids, there is a good chance you could have written the book in the time you have spent waiting.
The amount of time out of my life spent "on hold," trying to navigate automated voice-mail mazes is so staggering that I went and got a portable phone just to combat the problem. At least now, while waiting up to an hour for AT&T service help (all the while being reminded by a recording of the wonderful products they can sell me, such as call waiting, call forwarding and hold) I can clean the house, scrub toilets and fold laundry. I won't buy a new AT&T product until they learn how to do the old one, call answering, really well first.
I plan ahead as much as possible these days, trying to prebuy, preheat, presoak, or prepay, what I can so that I do not end up in long lines. Actually putting off until tomorrow what can be predone today takes even more time. Just think how long the wait is at the bank on Friday at 5:45 p.m., or at the post office on April 15.
You can reach Deborah Taylor-Hollis at dthollis@metronews.com with only 24 hours notice.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
