Professionals

They are in every hospital waiting room - the people who seem to delight in the spontaneous heart transplant, or emergency appendectomy, or spinal fusion.  They hover around ER entrances, just hoping someone that their cousin's husband's mother knew might have a kidney stone she can't pass so they can get their greedy claws into that brand new audience - worried family members.

They have no other recreational outlets.  Their churches uninvited them long ago to serve on any committee and the few friends they have are their clones in make-believe concern.  They probably have a meeting place, dark, where they congregate to share possible traumas they might descend upon.

You all know them.  They appear halfway through a surgery, just as the family is getting settled in, to dispense advise and compare procedures.  Someone's uncle had the same heart surgery, but he needed 8 bypasses and coded 5 times on the table.  A lady at church nearly died from neglect at the same hospital, having the same procedure your loved one is having.  A nephew of their postman used to work at said hospital and the stories he tells....

I could go on but you know the creature being described.

The females always wear way too much perfume - usually Estee Lauder "Youth Dew," and they aren't afraid to reapply after an hour or so.  Just as your nasal passages and sinus cavities are adjusting to the last squirt of evil.  The males inevitably have slicked back hair and Chester the Molester eyeglasses and use their handkerchief, often.

I think, if hospitals were smart and all about teachable moments, there should be some criteria necessary for admittance into surgical waiting rooms.  Tenuous connections to someone one of the family members knew forty years ago really doesn't grant you a seat in an overcrowded waiting area of a business, and that's what a hospital is.

And please?  Leave the Rook cards at home.