The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C., Neil Offen column

Apr 01, 2012 (The Herald-Sun - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- I'm waiting.

I'm still waiting.

The microwave is taking too long. The high-speed computer connection is taking too long. The movie download is taking too long. The less-than-10-item checkout line has someone with 13 items and is taking too long. My wife is taking too long.

I'm even taking much too long to get to my point.

In fact, what I'm doing instead of getting to my point is I'm standing here, by the side of the microwave, drumming my fingers on the counter, waiting for the interminable wait to be over and my food finally to be cooked.

(Fortunately, I am getting quite good at finger drumming and can now do the entire opening to the Dave Clark 5's "Glad All Over." I'm considering joining a band, as long as I don't have to wait for other band members to join me.) I am doing this finger drumming because, I mean, c'mon, a whole minute to make my lunch? What is this, the Middle Ages (which, in fact, took so long that they lasted until 1633)? Should we really have to wait this long to read the entire collected works of Stephen King, and everyone else named Stephen, after we've already pushed the button on our iPhone twice? Don't they realize we're busy people and have other places to go where we can show our impatience? Yes, like most of you, I am growing increasingly impatient in an inpatient world. The faster things get, the faster we want them. The faster we want them, the slower they seem to get.

We are frustrated that everything is only instantaneous when we don't want to wait that long.

It used to take weeks and months to get our facts wrong. Now we can do it in seconds. We used to spend years spreading information that we knew had no basis in truth and today we are capable of doing that with just one click.

Everything we want is at the tips our fingers, including our nails, and yet we still hate waiting and are reluctant to make an appointment with the manicurist.

We scream at our computers to hurry up when they are working so hard and so quickly you can see the veins bulging on their foreheads.

We need Twitter to find out immediately the absolute newest news from someone we really had no interest in until about 10:30 yesterday evening.

We check our Facebook accounts every four seconds because we can't wait to find out that all our friends are also just sitting around impatiently checking their Facebook accounts.

When we Google Chat and IM and text we can't wait for whole words to fully form so we use tiny abbrvs.

I think we all need to slow down and become a little more patient. I also have another point to make but I can't quite remember what it was. Just wait a minute, OK? Neil Offen can be reached at noffen@heraldsun.com or by telephone at 919-419-6646.

___ (c)2012 The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.) Visit The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.) at www.heraldsun.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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