Patience, they say, is a virtue. I don't know if that makes
me virtuous or not since over the years I have been described as both
exceedingly patient and also as very impatient. One manager of mine told me
that I was impatient with people who didn't meet my standards, a case of not
suffering fools gladly possibly, but actually my impatience was usually more
often borne of frustration, and sometimes with myself, that I couldn't get my
point across or couldn't get someone to understand how to do something. In
actual fact, I think that I am usually very patient when explaining things
except when the person to whom I am explaining them should understand but
doesn't.
It is a widely held belief that we get more impatient as we
get older and in some ways that is true; in others the benefit of experience
can make us less impatient. The so called impetuosity of youth is merely an
expression of impatience and in my case I think that I was more impatient
thirty years ago[1]
and looking around, I see more impatience among people younger than I than
those who are older. What is possibly more common among people of my age (ahem)
and older is a certain intolerance, not always the same thing as impatience,
but sometimes it's difficult to distinguish one from the other.
Impatience in any age group, but particularly among younger
people, is being driven these days by the increasing pace of life and the
expectations that people have. Take a simple and trivial example, the internet,
or more especially the mobile internet. When the internet was dial up and 2Mbps
was the norm, we waited with varying degrees of patience for our pages to load
but as speeds have increased there is a tendency to become impatient with our
3G or 4G phones loading pages "slowly" even when we now have speeds
of around 15Mbps on 4G.
Less trivially, it is
impatience on the roads that seems to have increased, or at least I seem to
have become more and more aware of it. I regard myself as a competent driver,
if somewhat risk averse as exhibited by the fact that my usual abhorrence of
being unpunctual goes out of the window when I'm on the road, where better late
in this life than early in the next is my motto, and so some of the sights I
see make me wince. I guess that every motorist has, at some time, hooted at the
driver who hasn't noticed that the traffic lights have changed, but impatience
seems to have crept in with many people to the extent that if you haven't moved
a whole nanosecond after the lights have gone green then they are sounding their
horn. When it has happened to me I have had to fight the impulse to put my
hazards on, get out of the car and enquire of the other driver if there is
anything I can help them with? Only the likelihood of physical violence and the
thought that I am actually inconveniencing myself and other non-hooting drivers
just as much as the horn happy driver behind me stops me from doing so.
Actually in all the years that I have been driving I think
that I have sounded my horn no more than once a year on average, but when I do
it seems that I have to aim it at pedestrians more than any other type of road
user. Unlike the USA, jaywalking is not an offense in the UK, but I am
increasingly wondering if it should be considering that standard of road
crossing that I see more often these days.
Just round the corner from where I live is a college, served by a bus
stop within ten yards of which is a Pelican crossing and every day, rather than
walk those ten yards from the bus stop to the crossing, hordes of people take
their lives in their hands and cross behind the bus. Perhaps they think they
are saving time, but typically with the amount of traffic on the road they have
to wait longer for a gap than they would take to walk to the crossing. And when
they do cross they saunter casually across with scant regard for the cars and
other vehicles, either engrossed in the music playing through their headphones
or by their phones, or as I saw recently, pausing in the middle of the road to
light a cigarette. One day there will be an accident and doubtless it will be
blamed on the motorist despite the suicidal manner in which these people cross
the road. So it is with these people that I get impatient, more for the
staggering arrogance that they display in expecting me and other drivers to
look out for them rather than taking their own safety seriously.
Another group of people with whom my patience is limited are
the shoppers who appear to be constantly taken by surprise when it comes to
paying for their purchases. Now I tend to be the type of person who has their
money or card ready to pay even when there are five people in the queue in
front of me, but at the head of this queue is normally someone who suddenly
realises, when the assistant tells them the price, that they ought now to start
digging out their purse or their wallet.
My patience also expires when dealing with those people who
don't call you back. You know how it is, you phone someone, be it the school or
the bank, or a shop and the person you speak to can't help but promises to call
back. In these days when being out of contact is nigh on impossible you would
think that one would never suffer the frustration of yesteryear when we
couldn't stray too far from our landlines for fear of missing that call back,
but now with everyone having mobiles there should be no excuse for not getting
a call back, and yet so often I have waited for a call, not got one and phoned
again. Same goes for people who don't reply to emails, people who claim that my
email must have gone to their spam folder, or who swear blind that they have
replied even though they patently have not: just how difficult is it to reply
to an email?
There is one thing that I have learned over the years
though, and that is being impatient is generally unproductive. The people with
whom I am impatient don't change because they know I'm impatient with them and
my being teed off with them does nothing except put me in a bad mood and raise
my blood pressure. The fact that I know this on a rational level does not stop
me from being impatient, rather I think that the causes of my impatience have
changed; sadly I think that I will remain An Impatient Man.
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