The waiting room

 I was checked in at the doctor’s office the other day – the chiropractor, really, because I’d been rear-ended by a truck on I-459 and my back was feeling it (but that’s another story for another day) – and the receptionist told me they’d get to me as quick as they could, but they were running a bit behind.

I took my seat in the waiting room.

There were no magazines.

That may not seem odd these days when everyone carries access to reading material in their pocket computers (known as cell phones), but for decades, old magazines were a staple of waiting rooms anywhere you had to wait for something – seeing a doctor, a dentist, getting new tires, even waiting for a bus. It was just courtesy, I guess; a way for businesses to help you pass the time and forget how long it was taking to get the service you were waiting to receive.

When I say “old” magazines, that’s what I mean. You’d find publications like “People” and “Popular Mechanics” and “National Geographic” and “U.S. News and World Reports” that were months, if not years, old. I never understood why, because you could look at the little label on the front and see that the doctor had a subscription, which means he must have received current editions. Maybe he took the current editions home to read first, and only brought them in when everyone in his immediate family was through with them.

I sat there the other day and watched the other people doing what people do now: look at their phones. Maybe they were reading emails, or playing games, or catching up on Facebook or twitter or Instagram, or news sites – all the stuff that I find myself doing whenever I’m in a position where I have to wait.

The thing is, when you go to your phone, you can download what you want to read, what you are familiar with.

In the old days of waiting rooms, you went through the stack of magazines – there never seemed to be one that you’d normally want to read – to try to find one that looked remotely, possibly interesting.

I actually enjoyed flipping through “People,’’ because there was always this section dedicated to paparazzi shots of supposedly famous people caught doing stuff. The thing is, invariably it would be someone “famous” that I had never heard of – some woman who because famous by being on a reality TV show who was caught coming out of a New York City workout class in sweat-stained tights and sports top, or an actor from a popular movie I knew nothing about who got caught leaving a Los Angeles nightclub at 3 a.m. with his arm around the daughter of some millionaire and an embarrassing trail of toilet paper caught on the bottom of his shoe.

Or maybe there would be a shot of a minor royalty from a Mediterranean country laying in the sun on a yacht. Or a drummer for a rock ‘n roll band trying to be inconspicuous while browsing through a used bookstore in some midwestern city.

The point is, I always learned something I didn’t know. If it was People, inevitable the next week I’d come across the name of that same “celebrity” in a dozen news stories and realize they really were famous after all. Or maybe I read about a tribe of Amazonian indigenous people whose lifestyle was being threatened by wildfires in the Brazilian jungle, or the history of some ancient kingdom in India, or an unusual combination of cheeses, combined with bits of bacon and some flavoring, to make “the perfect” macaroni and cheese.

In short, I very often learned something I did not know before. Maybe it even challenged me to want to learn more or re-think the things I had grown comfortable believing.

It further struck me how the more access to information we have, the less we really consume. It allows us to just read or watch what we want to read or watch, information brought to us by people we know we’ll agree with. Nothing is pushing us out of our comfort zone; very rarely are we confronted with a story that we read because we’re bored and there’s nothing else to read and it actually gives us something we didn’t know and maybe even raises our awareness or alters the way we think.

I mean, when is the last time you went to the search part of your cell phone and called up an old edition of Popular Mechanics or Archeology Magazine?

In the “olden days” we were limited in access to information. We had three TV networks (oh, there was a fourth: PBS, which nobody regularly watched), and two local newspapers, and maybe a magazine or two that your parents subscribed to. And you learned by talking to people about current issues or events they’d lived through or just hearing stories.

We live in an age when we have access to more information in that palm-sized device we carry with us everywhere than any time in the history of the world. But that also means we’re being lied to more than any time in the history of the world, with “fake news” and fake web sites and pictures that have been altered so well you don’t know what to believe.

We all laugh, knowingly, at the line “I read it on the internet so it must be true,” yet I’m as guilty as anyone of reading something on the internet and not challenging it to see if another source agrees or if there is a site that debunks the incredible story I just read and find hard to believe but feel I must share anyway.

The irony is, I could just as easily go on my iPhone and search for months-old versions of the magazines that used to litter every waiting room (if those publications still exist).

 But that would put the responsibility for my education back on my shoulders. And if there is one thing all my years of public education taught me, isn’t my education the government’s job?