Veterinarian

Waiting rooms have their own rules. You behave quietly, nod to the other people and won’t seek contact. With anyone. At least, that’s the case with general practisioners, dentist, pharmacies the ER and more of the like. Those are places where you want to sink into a deep anonimity. Apart from keeping your own ailment a secret to others, preferably, others will keep theirs a secret too. You don’t want to know about the itch of that woman next to you, or the sort of pills the guy who nearly emptied his longs in your lap has to take. The other day, I had the extraordinary experience of visiting a doctor that I knew from parties a long time ago. I’m easily embaressed by sharing humiliating things with experts, this time, I had to that after talking about the good old days.

I had to think of this weird situation when I was sitting in the waiting room of the veterinarian, a couple of days later. Here, the opposite is the case: people want to talk to each other. In the above, the common ground consist peronal and intimite things, in this case, you share one big thing: your love for your pet. Without talking about what is actually wrong with it (the reason why you’re there), you can easily have a great conversation about having pets in general.
Add to that that sick animals are really good in being quiet, adorable and pitful, which causes an extra shared problem: how to explain a sick animal what’s happening will actually help them in the end. It feels like you’re friends, even before you know the names, of the other pets.

That was another observation: at the vet, you loose your whole identity and you become just one thing: the boss of... All communication will be done through your animal, not only with the staff, but also with other pet owners: ‘My oh my, you are a cute little dog, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, she is only nine weeks old.’

Which is not convenient, expecially if the dogs boss hapens to be an attractive guy, who looks even cuter when he’s playing with his pup. Obviously, you won’t ask the dog if her boss is still available and if he would llike to have a drink one day. In this case, the situation was pretty hopeless to start with, since my sick cat was quietly lying in her basket. In every other situation, the whole cat issue could have been postponed untill the third date, so he would have know how great I am, before I told him I belong to the other group of people. You’re either a dog lover or a cat lover. And my love was gazing at the attractive guy with big, pitful eyes.

He didn’t notice anything. He was just playing with his pup.