All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in the Hospital Waiting Room

I had the ICU waiting room to myself , watching CNN, when a new family came in. There was a couple in their late thirties and two preteen girls, though I suspected one might not be a family member. Mother immediately instructed Daughter to turn the television to "some country music videos", which evolved into an argument between them over which abysmal channel we were all to be subjected to: Animal Planet or CMT. Mother wins, and we watch "The Grand Ole Opry" since there were no videos on. I might not have minded this terribly, except she got ahold of the volume button, too. Moments later, they brought out two portable DVD players and watched movies on headphones.

It was probably just as well, because the real show was not on the Ryman stage, but in our own waiting room when Dad chimed in. Another mother and daughter had joined us, and this daughter was working on a riddle for her online algebra course and was reading it over the phone to her aunt:

I'm large enough to hold the world
And yet sit upon a shelf.
And the strangest fact of all
Is that I contain myself.

Despite the fact that nobody asked him, Dad put his two cents in, and it all went south from there, quite literally.

"That's either gonna be the globe or the Holy Bible," he told the girl, who tried to be polite by indulging him. "But probably the globe, and the reason I say that is because of liberal teachings. Do you go to a faith-based school?" She said she didn't.

"Well, that's gonna be the globe then. That's why I had asked what subject this was. The globe--that's geometry and geology--that's math." To his credit, it was a better offering that the aunt on the phone, who guessed Humpty Dumpty.

Other pearls of wisdom included:

"I spot misused and misspelled words all the time. My wife's an RN. When she was in school, I proofread all her papers."
"You did not proofread all my papers," says the wife.
"That's what I said. I proofread most all of your papers," he argues, then tells all those around him, "She builds something, then I reconstruct it so it makes sense."
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"I'm way ahead in movies I watch, because I can see what's building up. It drives me crazy."
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"Math is the only absolute science. They got this fuzzy math now. They allow close answers. That's what they call is, fuzzy math."
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He and the girl with the riddle are discussing reading, and he's telling her that he can read anything at all and absorb it like a sponge: "I can read a book like that [points to girl's textbook] in two hours, take a 200-question test, and I guarantee I'll pass it."
Then, the girl admits to not being a big reader, and they discuss what books they find boring: "You know what'll put you to sleep? The Bible. 'Cause the devil puts you to sleep, and God wants you to be wide awake when you read it."