Thoughts while waiting for a COVID Test (editorial)

I took the plunge Sunday. That doesn’t necessarily mean what it did 43 years ago, when I took the ultimate plunge and got married. But these days, the expression can mean any one of a number of things. In this case, after five months of talking about it, I finally agreed to take a COVID test. It wasn’t merely because I had nothing better to do. I took it because someone I’d come in contact with several times over the last month felt sick enough over the weekend to get one. I kind of wanted to avoid the Christmas Rush, so to speak, and get one before I absolutely had to for official “quarantine” purposes, or before I felt too sick to drag myself down to the health center. As for the first part of the last paragraph, I picked a time to get one — Sunday afternoon from 1-4 p.m. in the tents on Buffum Street in Lynn — when I might as well have waited until the Christmas Rush. It took almost 2 ½ hours from the time I stepped into the line until I walked out of there. And as for the second, as I write this, I feel fine. The test, as I said, was purely cautionary. There was more than enough time to make a couple of casual observations. First, if you’re getting tested for a virus that has killed 160,000 of your fellow Americans, then you’d darn well better put a mask on. I’m proud of my fellow Lynners, because everyone in that line, from little kids on up, wore masks. Second, the worst part of queueing up for anything is to watch people who try to jump the line. You see this so often at the store when people leave their carts in the line so that they can take another quick run to get the one item they “forgot” to buy. Or perhaps they go into the gas station facing the wrong way rather than wait their turns. Or perhaps you’re waiting for the oncoming traffic to take a left into the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru line only to have two cars coming the other way sneak in there rather than allow you in. Maddening.   ...