This chair isn’t nearly as comfortable as it first was three hours ago…

Since then, I think I’ve identified a primary flaw in the design of the modern waiting room, that being that they’re really only equipped to keep somebody “waiting” for a relatively short period of time. The TV, the magazines, the big, seemingly comfortable chairs – these are all well and good for those instances where you’re in and out within a single episode of Maury, but when you’re here for the long haul, suddenly these offerings just grow more and more lacking by the hour. Granted, if this place were to actually invest in heavier duty waiting room amenities, we might get the crazy idea that we’re going to be here a lot longer than necessary, but I digress.

I think part of the problem with waiting rooms is that they give a guy like me entirely too much time to think about obscure, unimportant things like the design of the modern waiting room. I mean, I even remembered to bring a nice book this time and everything, but I can’t sit here in this uncomfortable chair and just read a book for three hours straight – who do I look like, a twelve year-old approximately fifteen minutes after the release of a Harry Potter book?! Sure, I’ve made significant progress in the thing since we got here (it’s Scott Adams’ book – Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! – because I enjoy both Dilbert and books written by people who share my name, just in case you were interested…), but for every fifteen or twenty minutes of reading, I’ve also caught my mind wandering on such concepts as “the butt divot” for easily double that.

I don’t have Wikipedia handy to tell me if it’s truly the technical term for it or not, but I’ve dubbed the butt divot this giant indentation that has formed under my gluteous maximus in the vinyl cushion of this chair that I’m sitting in. Honestly, it’s something that I’ve never really noticed before, but then again I’m not sure if I’ve ever put in anywhere near this kind of time in a waiting room before, either! And the problem with this infamous butt divot is that I’m finding it to be more and more uncomfortable over time, thus whereas an hour or two ago, I was only pleasantly annoyed by it and now I’m writing this here column as my only diversion from actually lifting this hellish chair over my head and throwing it across the room like an annoyed Incredible Hulk.

Note that I’ve been gently requested not to do so, as something like that might prolong our getting served even worse – hence with the writing.

Anyways, several increasingly curious questions have since been circling my mind regarding this mysterious divot. Was there, in fact, a pre-existing butt divot already in the chair when I sat down or is it in fact my own? Perhaps were the chairs even bought at some sort of discount because they already had butt divots in them and were thus deemed unfit for sitting by some more upscale waiting room in a faraway town? If I were to mention something to the lady at the front desk in a kind, non-Incredible Hulk-like fashion, would there be any chance that I could obtain myself a new chair that didn’t have such a butt divot? Let me tell you, when your butt feels like it’s been sitting on a toilet seat for over three hours, your mind starts to entertain some crazy ideas…

I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be sitting here and frankly, my butt doesn’t want to know because it’s not sure how much more of this it can take. It could be possible that these butt divots have some sort of tie-in to waiting room psychology and I’m being subjected to some sort of cruel experiment where the tenacity of the human buttocks is being put to the test – I’m not sure … it’s just too soon to tell. If that were the case, honestly it’d be good to know because me and my butt would just throw in the towel right now – we don’t have anything to prove down there!

What’s that? Now we’re going on four hours?! If it does turn out that this here divot is uniquely my own, something tells me we’re going to set a record here before we’re done – and no, I’m not bragging about that…