Persons at the Slipe Pen Road Comprehensive Health Centre in the Corporate Area, who turned out for the first day of activities following the abolition of user fees in public health-care facilities - Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer.

NOW MOST of us will agree that whenever you cram a bunch of distressed people into one tiny room, it's bound to cause trouble. Tell them to wait, and you're just asking for disaster.

In a small, musty waiting room at a doctor's office in Kingston recently, this theory proved itself true.

I had arrived at the office around 10 a.m. and anxiously peered inside to see how many people were already waiting. There were around 15 people in the room that looked like it was made to accommodate five. They were all sitting on white, plastic chairs and were engaged in various activities to help pass the time. Some were flipping through tattered magazines, others were fiddling around with their cellphones. A dusty ceiling fan was spinning lazily overhead and the one light bulb that illuminated the room kept flickering on and off.

I stepped into the room.

"Good morning!" I bellowed.

"Urgh" was the response from a handful of persons. The rest just sat there. I managed to brush this off and walked over to the nurse, a dark-skinned, chubby woman dressed in white, sitting behind a table. She looked like she had been up all night and kept rubbing her eyes. After giving her my name, I got up and looked around for a vacant seat.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Much to my distress, the only available seating was next to a skinny man with ashy elbows and large, dark spots on his legs. I knew this because he was wearing short pants and slippers. I nodded hello and sat beside him. He grinned and waved.

Now, as luck would have it, he was quite a jittery fellow and kept moving his legs back and forth. Everytime he would move, his legs would rub against mine. I don't need to tell you that this was not my idea of a good time. Everytime this happened, I would move further to my left, away from him. Within a few minutes, I was leaning so much to my left that I felt like I was about to fall off the chair. I was only moments away from unleashing a profanity-infused denunciation of the man and his spotty legs, when to my surprise, he turned to me and said: "So how yuh doing?"

His demeanor eased my temper and I told him that I was doing well. Trying to be polite, I asked him how he was doing. "Well, not too bad, is just di same problem come back again. It hard to handle some time," he said.

I looked down at the man's spotty legs and nodded. "Yes, that's how it is sometimes, but it should get better with treatment," I said.

The man looked puzzled.

"Yes, di cough dat mi have is hard fi handle. But as yuh say, it should get better with treatment," he said, looking me over.

Red in the face, I just smiled and nodded.

I started looking around the room at the other people waiting to see the doctor. There was an older man sitting in front of me, wearing a top hat and jacket. He kept rubbing the back of his head. I wondered what he had.

PEEPING TOM

Across the room was an attractive woman in a cleavage-friendly blouse. She was glancing in a magazine, one of the many stacked on a table beside her. A middle-aged man with two gold teeth was reading the same magazine over the woman's shoulder. He was mouthing the words as he read. When the woman realised what he was doing, she adjusted the front of her blouse and started flipping the pages quickly.

"Hi, hello! Mi nuh done wid dat yet," the man said, angrily.

The woman turned to face him. "Excuse me? Mi working wid yuh? Wah mek yuh nuh find yuh own magazine fi read? Outa order!" she yelled. The entire room turned to look at them.

"Is alright!" the man said. "So unnu young girl gwaan, man. Feel seh unnu too hot."

The man leaned back in his chair. "Yuh lucky!" the woman said.

The room went silent for a while and soon, all I could hear was the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Then, a man walked out of the doctor's office and went outside. Soon, the nurse stood up.

'Williams ... Williams," she said. Nobody moved. "Williams ... Williams." There was a long pause, and still nobody moved.

The nurse sat down and was about to say something else, when a man who had been sitting across from me, suddenly jumped up. "Williams!" he shouted and ran up to the nurse.

"So yuh never hear mi calling yuh?" the nurse asked him. "Yeah, but it never really register," he said, coyly.

The woman with the cleavage got up and walked over to him. "Ahh, mi inna kind of a hurry. Mi can go before yuh?" she said to him, smiling.

"Go before mi? After mi wait how long?" he replied.

"Mi know man, but because mi have one next appointment fi go, mi was wondering if yuh woulda mek mi go before yuh," she said.

The man looked down at her and her cleavage and then smiled.

"Alright, but yuh owe mi something," he whispered.

The woman smiled and strutted her way into the doctor's office, with the man's eyes following close behind.

robert.lalah@gleanerjm.com

The Roving with Lalah book, the sensational collection of articles that has taken the country by storm, is available at bookstores islandwide.