Pause for Purpose

Mark K May 16th, 2008

I recently witnessed something while waiting in line at the pharmacy and I’m having trouble coming up with a plausible explanation of what I saw. I was hoping that you could help me out.

Kaiser healthcare is extremely busy in our city and I had to stop at the pharmacy to pick up some medication for my son, who had had his wisdom teeth extracted. The pharmacy was packed with people, the line snaking almost to the door. It was extremely confusing about where you were supposed to stand depending on whether you were dropping off a prescription or picking one up. Finally I was able to drop off my prescription and was told to take a seat and my name would be called when it was ready.

As I sat and waited, I was able to observe what happens whenever an overburdened bureaucracy comes in contact with a harried public, impatient to have their needs met. An elderly woman with a cane, obviously sickly and uncomfortable would make it to the front of the line after waiting 20 minutes. The clerk would explain to her very politely that her prescription was not available because she hadn’t picked it up soon enough and the elderly woman would become insensed. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but there was a good deal of head wagging and finger pointing and an occassional phrase such as “I’ve had this happen every time” or “I’m not going to leave here until…” or “You people…” (never an auspicious beginning to a sentence, in my opinion). The clerk would remain amazingly courteous throughout the interchange, but you got the feeling that she had this sort of confrontation a couple of times every hour.

While all this was going on, a woman – forty-ish, neatly dressed, relatively healthy-looking – enters the pharmacy and joins the long line waiting to drop off prescriptions. The thing that set her apart was not that she was talking on a cell phone (several other people were doing the same) but that she got down on her knees in her place in line as she was talking. I had the feeling that maybe the reception was bad inside the building and that it was better in just that one particular location. But then the next thing she did struck me as very odd.

As the line slowly moved forward, she remained on her knees, actually walking on her knees to move up behind the person ahead of her. She kept talking, completely unselfconscious, resting back on her haunches from time-to-time when the line wasn’t moving.

She remained on the phone (and on her knees) for the entire 15 minutes while she was in line and, as luck would have it, ended up at the window next to me when I was called up to the counter. I heard her say to the person on the other end of the phone, “I’ve been standing in line for 15 minutes at Kaiser Pharmacy.”

By now my curiosity was really getting the best of me and I felt like interrupting and saying, “No, you were actually kneeling in line for 15 minutes and at times crawling on your knees. Why? Can you please tell me why oh why you were doing this?

I remember when I was growing up; we visited a cathedral in Montreal where people with health problems would wait in a long line, which reached for blocks up a sidewalk and up the stairs into the cathedral. They were waiting on their knees, just like this woman, inching their way along, one step at a time. When you reached the shrine inside the cathedral, there was a collection of crutches, canes and braces from people who had crawled up there over the years, apparently miraculously cured of their afflictions.

Is this what this woman was doing? Would I return someday to Kaiser pharmacy and find her cell phone resting on the counter as a token of her appreciation for having received her prescription in a timely manner?

Alas, I failed to have enough nerve to ask her why she had chosen this method of navigating the Kaiser queue and so I turn to you, the readers, for help.

Please explain!

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