I can deal with the obnoxious muzak. The scream of a dentist's drill is irritating, but ignorable. I can put up with ringing phones and the nonstop traffic of patients and delivery men. A couple conversing about their weekend plans? No problem. The continual call for patients to be taken to the back rooms? Bring it on. One aspect of trying to read while in a waiting room that I simply cannot ignore, however, is the obese man across from me breathing heavily through his thick mustache.
The location: A cardiologist's waiting room. Armchairs lining the perimeter. Tables stacked high with old issues of People and US Weekly. The room was relatively empty when I entered with my mom and dad. Like an eleven-year-old girl, I sat beside my mom next to the magazine table in the corner with my finger marking my place in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Year 7). The pages were parted and the binding spread across my lap before I was settled in the soft chair.
Harry, Hermione, and Ron were just completing their transformations into their new identities thanks to the Polyjuice Potion when the assistant called my dad back. Concerned for her husband's health, my mom followed him in; leaving me alone with my three friends outside of the Ministry of Magic. There was one other man in the waiting room with me and an older couple that were soon called to the back.
Before I knew it, Hermione was in the courtrooms with Umbridge, Ron was taking care of a raining office, and Harry and I were searching for R.A.B.'s locket in a kitty-decorated office. While we tiptoed under the Invisibility Cloak, a heavy-set man entered the waiting room and plopped himself down in a chair facing me on the other side of the room. By the time Harry and I realized that what we were looking for was somewhere else, I was barely making it through one sentence increments without the interruption of whistling air.
Let's pause a moment for a demonstration. Go to an open window and place your mouth within an inch from the screen. When you're there, exhale. Go ahead. I'll wait. You know that high-pitched sound that was created by blowing air through the tiny stitching of the window screen? Imagine hearing that with every breath a stranger makes. Inhale whistle. Exhale whistle. Slow, loud, and annoying. Now try to read a book with that as the background noise.
It would be one thing if he was breathing with a normal pattern. Inhale 1-2-3. Exhale 1-2-3. Inhale 1-2-3, etc. I don't know if it's because he was nervous about seeing the doctor and I don't know if it's because he couldn't get comfortable in his seat, but his breathing was so scattered and unpredictable that I couldn't follow Harry around without stopping and rereading. I tried over and over again to go uninterrupted from the "Senior Undersecretary to the Minister's" office, into the golden elevators, and down to the courtrooms. I tried to sit in on the Muggle-born's hearing, but all I could hear was this man's breathing.
My Uncle Wes was a loud breather. A friend of my family is a loud breather. I remember standing at the bus stop as a kid with my neighbor and furrowing my brow in disgust at his loud breathing as he told me about his weekend. I don't get it. If I can sit ten feet from a person and hear his breathing, how can he not be bothered by it himself. His nose is three inches from his ear! Doesn't that noise get old? It's not as though he's out of breath and has to breathe harder. His exhales are whistles!
Eventually my parents came back from their appointment and rescued me from the obnoxious man, but not before I became thoroughly annoyed by his hissing and wheezing. Harry, Hermione, and Ron eventually escaped the grip of Yaxley, but not as quickly and effortlessly as they would have had the fat man not been present. It will forever be a mystery to me how a man can breathe so audibly and be so unaware of the noises coming out of his own nose and mouth.
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