I have many abiding memories of secondary school, but none as vivid as my science teacher, Mrs Chambers, writing in capital letters on the whiteboard a word: “toddler”. Every time you misbehaved, she’d take her oversized and slightly threatening long wooden ruler, and with a withering stare tap on the whiteboard. The message was clear. You are a toddler. You’re a toddler for speaking when she is talking, a toddler for not doing your work. It was a shrewd move because, at that age, nothing is as mortifying as an adult outing you as a child.
“Toddlers have one thing in common,” she would say. “They cannot wait. They want everything now. You children need to learn to wait. Patience is a sign of maturity.”
I often think about Mrs Chambers when I am considering smashing my laptop to smithereens because the loading icon has frozen, or hyperventilating because the Uber arrival time has jumped from three minutes to seven.
I bet she doesn’t break into a cold sweat when she is told she needs to print rather than email a document. She probably has a printer at home, neatly tucked away on a shelf. She won’t have to wander around looking for a printer shop, increasingly desperate and dehydrated, like a desert drifter, tortured by mirages of printer shops that are in fact phone shops.
What can I say? I’m part of the instant gratification generation, said to be ruined by technology that delivers everything instantly: messages, transport, dinner, information. We want results right now, an impulse that may be good for political change, but not for paper-based admin.
But good things come to those who wait. Look at Mrs Chambers herself. One of the smartest women I knew at the time (I was a teenager, remember). Everything she learned she got from a book that she had to get from a library, presumably one she walked to, and which possibly didn’t have said book the first time. I imagine myself in that circumstance, the librarian explaining that I would have to wait, and would I like to reserve the book, and I am sure I would say, “Nah, I’ll just stay stupid, thanks.”
But I am getting better. When I phone the doctor, I now stay on hold rather than slamming the phone down and thinking, “I’ll take my chances.” And I always give myself plenty of time in front of any iconic travel landmark to get the perfect Instagram photo. Because that’s what Mrs Chambers meant about patience and maturity, right?
