Hospital Waiting Rooms

Dear Aunt Slugger,

Recently, my sister and I spent some time in a hospital waiting room with a young man that tried to impress us (and seemingly hit on my sister) by telling us about his collection of 9 millimeter guns and a certain "Desert Storm" weapon and silencer he was hoping to purchase. My sister nodded along and feigned interest while I put on some headphones and pretended not to hear him. Keeping in mind that his uncle was sharing a hospital room with our father, what was the correct way to respond to this situation?

Sincerely,
Dad, We Love You, But This Waiting Room is Really Inconvenient

Dear DWLYBTWRIRI:

First of all, it's important for Aunt Slugger to determine specifically WHICH Desert Storm weapon your waiting room friend was looking to purchase? Was it the Tapeworm, Hopper-9, or LYF-07 Stymie? Because if it was the LYF-07 Stymie, that is a BAD ASS weapon and if this guy really needs to get one, I can certainly put him in touch with--what was that? Oh, fine. Sorry, DWLYBTWRIRI, but the stuffed shirts in our legal department have asked me not to continue on with this paragraph.

Whatever.

Anyway, DWLYBTWRIRI, let's make sure we have all the facts here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to sum up the situation with bullet points (no pun intended):

- You were in a hospital waiting room.
- Your father was hospitalized.
- The gun afficianado's uncle was also hospitalized.
- This guy decided, with emotions running high, that there's no better time to bag a lady than while his uncle is languishing in a hospital bed a few feet away.
- He further decided that he would put on his best game and discuss his gun collection.

Quite frankly, you have nothing to complain about. Your hospital waiting room experience is only atypical in the sense that you were not in the presence of at least nineteen other psychotic whackjobs. I include the emergency room doctors in this statement as well, all of whom have been awake since 1973 and all of whom believe that the single greatest medical threat facing our nation is earwax. I have never been to a doctor's office or hospital and NOT had my ears drained, cleaned, and buffed. You can go into an emergency room HOLDING YOUR LIVER IN YOUR HAND, and you will be told that you have a serious earwax situation. And for those of you who think that the cure for earwax doesn't involve strapping you down and putting a hot pink liquid laxative in your ear, you obviously have never lived.

So you do not have my sympathy, DWLYBTWRIRI. Not at all. The fact that you only had one conversation about silencers during the course of your wait means that you got off lucky.

Your earwax problem, on the other hand, is out of control, but we'll save that for another column.

Sincerely,
Aunt Slugger