The ticket says 47 and the screen above the counter says 31. Nobody in the room is doing anything, and nobody can leave, because the number might jump while you are at the vending machine and then you start again from the back. It is a pause of a kind, the hour between arriving and being seen, held open by someone you cannot see on terms printed nowhere. On the phone the same hour comes with music, eight bars round and round, and a recorded voice every few minutes to say your call is important.
Waiting tells you where you stand. In 1974 the sociologist Barry Schwartz argued that waiting is handed out along the same lines as power: the more a person's hours are thought to be worth, the fewer of them go on waiting for anyone else. The consultant is seldom on hold to the patient. Bourdieu counted waiting among the plainest ways power is felt, especially the kind of delay that never quite puts out hope. Wait years for papers, for a court date, for a council flat, and a life can end up packed and unpacked in the same room, never quite starting.
The pause people pay for looks much the same from outside: a weekend of silence in a converted farmhouse, phones locked in a pouch at the door, a bell to begin and a bell to end, hours of nothing measured to the minute. In both rooms someone else keeps the clock. The difference is in the terms. At the retreat you know when the last bell will ring, and you can walk out whenever you like and lose nothing but the fee, which is exactly what nobody in the waiting room can do. Under those terms empty time can let a thought finish arriving and a decision settle without being pushed. The waiting room teaches something else, a little more with each visit: that your hours are someone else's to spend.
At four the screen stops at 44 and a voice says the office is closing. Everyone from 45 up is asked to come back tomorrow, and most of them will.