Lesson three – Overcoming "Line Fear" – November 2009
Since I am basically an impatient person, I often agonize over how long I think that a line will take before I get served. When I get in a line with two people or more, I just automatically assume I’m "stuck" and it will take forever to get waited on.
To find out if my lack of patience is justified, I did an experiment for a two week period.
I kept a waiting time log, I noted the time on my watch when I started waiting, and the time that I actually go served to see how long it really does take.
Here are the results of this unscientific study:
Restaurants – Here I noted the time from when I walked in the door until I actually got our food.
- Williams restaurant – 10 minutes
- Williams restaurant – 15 minutes
- Chinese buffet – 5 minutes
- Lido’s pizza – 20 minutes
- Chilies’ – 10 minutes
- Einstein’s – 4 minutes
Total time – 64 minutes
Average restaurant wait – 10.6 minutes
Waiting for things to happen:
Traffic jams (stop and go traffic – until traffic started moving again.)
- Traffic on Route 1 – 4 minutes
- Traffic on Route 197 – 8 minutes
Total time – 12 minutes
Average traffic jams waiting time – 6 minutes
Miscellaneous
- Pharmacy – no wait
- Michaels Craft store – waiting for check out – 5 minutes
- 711 store – waiting for check out – 3 minutes
- Eye doctor – waiting to see the doctor – 37 minutes
- Time spent assembling a bench from LL Bean – 20 minutes
Total time – 68 minutes
Average waiting – 11.66 minutes
Almost every time I waited, I would have assumed that the waiting time was at least 50% longer than it actually was. This experiment was a real eye opener for me, and an excellent lesson on patience that I will keep in mind, next time I’m "trapped" in a line.
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