Why Waiting Is Torture
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Unless it's in my car and I can't use my smartphone. Another exception is when I am with people and it is socially unacceptable for me to focus on my phone. If we have nothing interesting to talk about, the wait is as painful as ever, perhaps even worse if I am jonesing for my phone.
Standing up a long time can cause physical pain, so that part doesn't go away even if I have a phone.
Also I wonder if smartphones have decreased impulse buys of candy and that other stuff in supermarket lines.
Of course, if you don't have such an electronic device, some people say a thing where entertaining or illuminating texts are permanently fixed to a pieces of processed plants, also known as "book", often helps. I've used that remedy many times too, and can vouch for its effectiveness.
Surprisingly pleasant! I just wish that books tended to be more trivially portable, so I could carry them with me all the time. Cell phones with books on them are nice, but the tiny, backlit screen is less than ideal.
I don't have a smartphone and I probably won't get one until I need some of its functions desperately enough. I like waiting and doing nothing: it's the time to be, it's time for myself. I never run for the bus or tram or train, instead I walk as if it was waiting for me forever. If it leaves before I hop in, I just consider it some time for not-doing.
Actually, this removes the meaning of "waiting" and "pause". If the "pause" doesn't actually break anything in your day then you're not "waiting" either. It's just your day, sometimes going forward, something stalling, sometimes going backwards, like a little toy boat whirling along in a stream. There's nothing to pause from and nothing to wait because everything just is.
My smartphone has only one essential function. Provide access to the internet. I consider that a necessity. Apparently you do too or I wouldn't be reading your comment.
> I like waiting and doing nothing: it's the time to be, it's time for myself.
I can understand not wanting to be connected all the time. However, for myself, I only want to disconnect when I'm with other people ... when I'm by myself, I want to spend that time on my interests, which are conveniently found on the net.
This doesn't follow. Commenting on HN doesn't imply that the commenter requires the internet. It doesn't even imply that the commenter likes the internet or thinks that overall it is a net-gain.
Where the smartphone gets in the way is when you want peace or when a situation is slightly uncomfortable but we retreat to the smartphone out of mindless habit. We use smartphones to not only connect with people but also to avoid people.
This seems like a weird and arbitrary use of the word be that is not defined in the dictionary that I have. So I do not understand what it is you are saying.
When it's time for myself I like to use my smartphone. Because it's interesting to me. I can read interesting articles, I can distract myself with books, catch up on emails and online discussions. I like these things. I can also choose to not use my smartphone if I'm not interested in what my phone has to offer. Owning a smartphone does not mean I am required to use it, but not owning a smartphone makes it impossible to use one if you wanted to.
If I put you into a refrigerator box with pencils, pens, watercolors, paper, and light, then after a day cut a slot in it, what you passed out to me would be you.
The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time lazily consuming the synthesis of others, getting vicarious doses of the feeling of discovery, a pale imitation of actual, original discovery through reflection on what they have already incorporated into themselves.
th-d;dr* information consumption without reflection isn't learning, it's cataloging. Proper consumption/reflection ratio: 1:10, median: 100:1.
*too hippy-dippy; didn't read.
Thanks for pointing it out! I meant "being" as opposed to "doing". Some people use "not-doing" instead but that sounds even weirder.
Being means... well, just that. You just are, you don't have anything to work on or focus on. You just be and see later what came out (if anything). It might sound like zen stuff but most people do that naturally if only they occasionally stop themselves from doing something.
If I'm sitting in a bus I'm likely to just be: I don't think anything in particular, I just watch and observe without analyzing, I might think about something but then I gleefully forget about it. An internet connection or a smartphone in general would just distract me. The moments of just being are worth a lot of gold in my life and I'm enough aware of them that I actively try not prevent them. Thus my smartphone policy.
It is good to you to be able to be yourself in the lines, and shows you will be able to handle the "distractions" of a smartphone easily.
Queues can be indicative of a more serious issue - indifference. Government offices have earned their way up to the top of this list. Government queues could very easily be improved by either getting larger offices, hiring more officers, optimizing queue lines, estimating times and allowing you to return after 3 hours instead of making you wait and a hundred other ways any of you could come up with in less than 5 minutes.
The problem is not the queue but the organization.
I remember a cartoon showing the difference between waiting lines in the US vs. China: an orderly serial line here, an amorphic mass of dots all aiming for the one entrance there. Europe is somewhere in between. Queues are like little war zones where everyone aims to achieve their goal the first. I remember when I was in a ski club (in Germany) how we were exchanging techniques on how to get on the lift first: take the outer part of the curve. Even better, pair up so that one can slowly move inwards so that your mate who follows you can overtake you and continue in the same manner (this works only with skis, however, which are used as barriers). I remember queuing at a certain nightclub which didn't have a serial queuing line. The best strategy there was to stand sideways which allowed you to better fill the little gaps that sometimes appear as people move in the bulk. In general, as an American traveling to Europe, I would recommend to do as the Romans do and regard queuing as sport. Don't call out to people who are cutting the line, they will usually not do it either if you try - but be smart enough to appear as it was just by accident.
But there are signs of change. The single-queue system has only appeared about 20 years ago and is called the "American queue". Post offices and airports have switched to this system. It's definitely an improvement.
I was amazed when I first stayed in the US how patient people were standing in line, but even more, how many lines there were. I would say you're waiting about twice as much in lines in the US than in Europe. The queuing experience here is just so unpleasant that people try to avoid them overall. A grocery store chain has big signs for the employees to open up a new cash desk should more than 2 customers wait in line. In most cases machines have taken over jobs for which you would usually stand in line, and then they put up enough machines so that you don't have to wait. I have hardly ever waited to get into a movie theater (seats are bought online and are numbered) or to get train tickets (lots of ticket machines). At Schloss Neuschwanstein (the original "Disney Castle") you order a ticket for a certain time and can spend the waiting time in a restaurant or hiking the surrounding mountains. The list could go on. To me it is quite unbelievable that Disney doesn't do it this way in its parks. And it very odd to me to go skiing in the US where they rather hire workers to organize the queues instead of increasing lift capacity.
These days however after having read a lot about meditation I see queues as a great opportunity to switch off thinking. When was the last time you spend a while listening to your breathing? Marvel at the colors of your surroundings? Watch yourselves as your mind desparetely tries to find something to think about? I'm trying to do this now whenever I have to wait. Unless I'm distracted by my smart phone, of course...
I am a customer, and i expect good service.
In the nightclub industry, people understand this. They create artificial barriers to entry so that, when people get in, they spend loads of money "on the experience" because they feel lucky and perhaps a bit superstitious. It works for a few months and makes an enormous amount of money.
Two years later, some other club is hot and that one is a non-concern, full of "B&T" (bridge and tunnel, i.e. non-New Yorkers) and college kids on spring break. There's actually a lot of truth in the Yogi Berra quote: "That place is so crowded, no one goes there anymore." Once "the crowd" can get in, no one important wants to be there, and the $10,000-per-night people have moved on. A nightclubs has a lifespan. The owners and promoters put it into maintenance mode and start another one. This works extremely well for that industry. If you can sell a $30 bottle of vodka for $700, you've figured something out. Having to start a new club every 18 months isn't a major burden for the owners and promoters. It's the Hollywood model of starting a new project every year.
This works poorly for the airlines, which have infrastructural needs that require them to focus on the long term. The airlines play similar status games. There's economy which is deliberately uncomfortable, and first/business (first in domestic flight, business) which ought to be 1.5x the price (50% more space) but is between 1x and 5x depending on a bunch of weird variables, some of which are deliberately indexed to the person's socioeconomic status. You never get a good sense of what a ticket "should" cost because they deliberately keep it vague.
In the long run, this leads to abandon. Truly high-status people don't use commercial airlines anymore, not even international first. The rest will fly commercial but hate the experience, and would probably ditch the planes in a second if we had decent (250+ mph, 5-8 cents per mile) train service like they have in Europe. Morale in the industry is at an all-time low. As soon as credible alternatives to the mainline commercial airlines exist, they're done for.
In other words it's reinforcing the primary argument of the article, the perception of waiting is more important than actual wait time.
That is true, since say a 5 minutes traffic jam seems like eternity compared to say 25 minutes of driving. Wonder if we can apply this principle to any situation. For example customer perception of progress in a consulting project is much better when you are hitting all kinds of milestones while developing a feature such as design, prototyping, development, testing, deployment. Ironically if we say we are doing all of those in parallel, it doesn't work very well.
The most excruciating waits that I've had to deal with in the last many years are at the Ausländerbehörde here in Germany -- the "foreigners' office". It's the place that you have to go to get a work permit if you're not German.
They use a randomized system. You don't have any idea if you're going to be waiting 10 minutes, 3 hours or even if you'll make it through the line at all before they close for the day. Combined with the stress of the possibility of rejection or missing some critical piece of paperwork, the uncertainty adds a huge amount of cognitive load. Need to go to the bathroom after you've been waiting for an hour? What if they call your number while you're away for 5 minutes? I would love for them to switch to a linear system so that I could produce a ballpark estimate of where I am in the queue.
Btw, one strategy the article doesn't mention is making queues seem more asynchronous-- this is what Starbucks does when they employ "expeditors", those employees who walk the line and take orders (but not cash). The (partial) success of having ordered your coffee mitigates the agony of waiting to reach the cash register (it also makes people less likely to abandon the line).
Best medicine for that is a linear observable order, which is easily controlled and obviously hard to subvert - if you see you're number 42 you know you're going after 41 and everybody knows that, and if somebody doubts it you can just show your number and prove it's fair.
Might be related to the topic at hand.
The same philosophy which underlies the familiar "under promise and over deliver". Guess this also explains the enormous amount of outrage that comes out of schedule slips, even in cases where schedule is of little consequence.
In my current culture (MA, USA), there's little punishment available for inefficiency, such as taking a long time to pay, or deciding on an order for food. You can give someone a dirty stare, but that's about it.
Some cultures do punish explicitly. For example, if you hold up a line in NYC mid-day ordering lunch, staff yells at you to hurry up, and may even kick you out. A harsh but effective message. Their other queued customers are being inconvenienced by your inefficiency. They'll walk out and go get lunch next door. Fire one and keep many.
Other cultures are different. In Costa Rica, an extremely laid back environment, customer service takes 2-3 times as long. It might take you 60-90 minutes to pickup a rental car at the airport even if you're the only person in line. People don't mind waiting. Slow is the norm.
Waiting is torture, welcome, whatever, if you let it. Your environment influences your decision, but it still remains your decision to choose.
Lower complaints means longer waits (less efficiency) and everyone's happy because it lets them get that final star on level X.
One thing almost every office plan gets wrong (unless intimidation is part of the design) is open-back visibility. It makes people stressed and unhappy and less productive than they could otherwise be, but a lot of offices use this style of plan because it's cheapest.
— Matthew 20:1–16, King James Version