If you require a visa for a certain country, you should arrive at the consulate early in the morning to beat the crowd. You are told to take a number and wait in a crowded room for up to one hour before being called. You pay your money, leave your passport there, and are told to come back between four and five. When you come back you wait another hour—more if you cannot find the receipt they gave you in the morning. “Think hard,” the clerk says, “for we process 200 visas a day.” Luckily, you may be able to find it.

Patients attending large inner-city hospitals are also subjected to interminable waits. They wait in the emergency room; they wait to be registered. They wait for appointments, for x-rays, for cardiograms. They spend hours in the clinic before they are seen. They stand in line at the pharmacy counter and then are told that their medicine has not yet arrived and they should come back tomorrow. Or they find that the intern has not filled in the form correctly, but when they go back to the clinic, their session has ended, everybody has left, the intern is nowhere to be found, and nobody knows who he was anyway because the signature is illegible.

Elsewhere, people stand in line at popular restaurants, waiting to be seated. They stand in line to buy a brand of popcorn that supposedly tastes better than most others. They queue for rock concerts, for Monet or Picasso exhibitions, for movie tickets, in traffic jams, at the post office. They wait for hours on the phone to speak to a human being at the Social Security office, the phone company, at airline reservation counters, or at any large company that plays abominable music but announces that your call is important to us, but all “advisers” are busy “servicing” other customers. Clearly Aristotle was wrong when he wrote that “Man is by nature a political animal.” He should have said “Man is a waiting animal.”