Among other things, I try to run a house.
That means there has never been a moment since the house was built that everything is working at the same time. A light is always burned out somewhere, a disposal won't dispose, or something has a pan under it to catch a leak.I call repairmen and prepare to grow old.
They tell me they'll schedule me two weeks from Tuesday. Hang around the house and they'll call if they can make it.
It's the same thing with doctors and dentists. You tell your physician's receptionist that you're dying, and she'll put you on hold, return and ask, "How about 2 p.m. three weeks from today?"
That's why it gave me pause a few weeks ago to read that within HOURS after the L.A. riots, somone had written a song, "Can We Get Along?" and it was on the air. That same day, five concerts were in the works to raise money. There is no doubt that a writer somewhere is pitching a movie starring Mel Gibson as Peter Ueberroth as we speak.
It's the same with a murder trial that gets a lot of play. One night you're seeing it on the 6 o'clock news, and within the week it's a six-hour miniseries. Yet it takes 45 days to get a sofa slipcovered.
Books that normally take a year to write and another nine months to publish have been known to get into gear overnight. Within two weeks after war was declared on Baghdad, a book, "Desert Voices," was in the book stalls. Same thing with "The Pentagon Papers" and "The Tower Report." How do they do that in two weeks? It takes a cable company longer than that to answer its phone when you've lost your picture.
There's something wrong here, America. We've been programmed to believe that it takes three days for a check written to you to clear, so how come it takes only three hours to process and return one stamped "Insufficient Funds" that you have written?
I know we can do it. We can develop pictures in an hour, get a pizza delivered in 30 minutes and prescription glasses made on our lunch hour. It's not that I'm an impatient person. I don't have to have everything yesterday. I only want to get a refund on an airline ticket while I'm still alive and a dress I ordered from a mail-order catalog before it goes out of style.