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Pat Freestone is a video store clerk. He is currently employed as Night Assistant Manager at an independent rental store, a position he has held for eleven years without interruption, promotion or complaint. His hobbies include watching movies, surfing the internet, and compensating for his astigmatism. Pat, age 42, is currently single. His column ran here every week for the better part of a decade.

What follows is the last complete week of it, preserved in the order it was published, which is to say backwards.

October 11

And so we arrive at the summit. Number one on Pat Freestone's Top Five All-Time Greatest Waiting Rooms Ever is the waiting room at the tire and alignment place on the state road, and I will tell you exactly why, and I will not be rushed.

It has a window onto the bay. That is the whole thing. You can watch the men work on your car. You are not permitted to help, or to speak, or to indicate through the glass that you believe a bolt has been dropped, but you may watch. For ninety minutes you are given a job, and the job is watching, and you cannot be fired from it.

There is also a coffee machine that dispenses into a paper cup that is already in place, which I consider the pinnacle of American design. And there is a bench along the window that is exactly the wrong height for a man of my build, which forces a posture I have come to think of as my thinking posture.

I have spent more consecutive hours in that room than in any room I have ever paid rent on.

Thank you all for following along.

For schnitzel,
Pat Freestone

October 10

At number two, the waiting room at the walk-in clinic, and I want to be clear that I am ranking the room and not the visit.

The room is triangular. I have never encountered another triangular waiting room and I have looked. The chairs run along the two long walls and face each other across the short one, so that everybody present is obliged to look at everybody else at a slight and forgiving angle, rather than head-on. Whoever did that understood something about people that most architects do not.

The magazines are eleven years old and they are the good ones. There is a fish tank with two fish in it and room for forty. On my last visit a woman across from me said “long day?” and I said “you have no idea” and she nodded and that was the entire conversation and I have thought about it many times since.

Deductively,
Pat Freestone

October 9

By popular demand we continue the countdown. At number three, the waiting room at the motor vehicle office, which I am aware is a controversial selection.

People will tell you it is a bad room. People will tell you it is the worst room. Those people have not considered that it is the only room in the country where everyone in it wants precisely the same thing, in precisely the same order, and where that order is publicly displayed on a board. There is no ambiguity there. Nobody in that room is wondering where they stand. I find it restful in a way I have not been able to explain to my colleague at the store, who says I need a hobby, and who knows perfectly well that I have several.

Take a number.
Pat Freestone

October 8

At number four this week we have the waiting room at the dentist, which earns its place almost entirely on the strength of the aquarium and the small chair.

Every dentist's waiting room contains one chair that is smaller than the others. It is intended for children. It is never occupied by children, because children sit on their mother. It sits there empty, all day, every day, being small. I have never sat in it. But I know it is there for me if the day ever comes.

Also they play music at a volume specifically calibrated so that you can tell there is music but not what it is. This is harder to achieve than people realize.

Fondly,
Pat Freestone

October 7

Welcome to the premiere of Pat Freestone's Top Five All-Time Greatest Waiting Rooms Ever.

We have all been there. You have taken the afternoon off, you have brought a book you are not going to read, and you have arrived eleven minutes early because you are not the sort of person who arrives late. And then it becomes apparent that the room you are sitting in is going to be the main event, and the appointment is merely the thing that ends it.

At number five: the waiting area outside the tax preparer's office in the strip mall, which is not technically a room, being a widened section of corridor with four chairs in it, but which I am including because of the plant. That plant has been in that corridor since before I moved to this state. It receives no natural light of any kind. It is not doing well and it is not dying. It is simply continuing, at enormous cost, for reasons of its own.

I salute it.

Check in tomorrow for more of Pat Freestone's Top Five All-Time Greatest Waiting Rooms Ever.

Regards,
Pat Freestone

October 4

Well. There is no accounting for taste.

Although I considered last week's countdown a genuine and unqualified success, it has come to my attention that several customers and web-surfers did not agree. One correspondent wrote to say that my selections were, and I quote, “self-indulgent, grossly inappropriate, and flew in the face of all established film criticism.”

I have had that sentence taped to the inside of my locker for a week now.

“Self-indulgent” — well, a column is a self, indulged. That is the form. “Grossly inappropriate” — I would refer the correspondent to the fact that nobody was harmed. And “flew in the face of all established film criticism” is, I think we can agree, the finest thing that has ever been said about my work, and I intend to have it printed on something.

Still, I am not above heeding the heartfelt advice of my readers and renters. So this week, rather than rank characters, or the people who play them, or the people who point the cameras at the people who play them, I would like to take a look at something that everyone can relate to.

The rooms we sit in before the thing happens.

The people have spoken.

Sincerely,
Pat Freestone

Editors' note