I found myself in a hospital waiting room the other day doing nothing but, well, nothing. Which was a problem. This is the 21st century and I don’t do nothing.
There is always something to do. Carrying my trusty smartphone, I check my email in supermarket queues, read ebooks while travelling on the train and write tweets while waiting for family members outside fitting rooms.
If those aren’t enough, I have 50 other apps giving me 50 other options for things to do. There is no reason to burden myself carrying a book or magazine. And there is certainly no need to do nothing.
Except in a hospital. While there is an app for most things, there isn’t yet an app that will stop mobile phones from interfering with the machines that go ‘bing!’. Nor is there an app that will bring the waiting room selection of magazines into the 1990s, let alone the 2010s.
So in the sterile halls, I have to sit. And do nothing.
The early Greek philosopher Parmenides argued that there is no such thing as doing nothing. The gist of his reasoning, put crudely, was that you can’t think about ‘nothing’ because as soon as you do, you are thinking about something. To a point, I can see where he was coming from. But in the early 5th Century BC, Parmenides wasn’t forced to sit in a hospital waiting room unable to use his iPhone.
Then again, perhaps I should be comfortable with the idea of doing nothing. As another philosopher, Brian’s co-crucifee at the end of The Life of Brian put it: “You know, you come from nothing, you’re going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!”. So surely a little bit of nothing in between isn’t going to make a lot of difference.
If I practice, perhaps I could get good at doing nothing. Oscar Wilde said “I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about”. If I became an expert on nothing, could I be compared with Oscar Wilde? More likely I’d just be called a bore.
Let’s face it: it’s not going to happen. In the modern era, nothing is not worth thinking about. I think I’ll just stay away from hospital waiting rooms.
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I've been work- ing in business, one way or another, for the last 20 years, and writing for the last ten. My main interest now is to get messages across - yours and mine - in a readable and approachable fashion. 
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Ha ha those notices about using mobiles in hospitals are largely baloney. My partner is a doctor and he uses his iphone all the time. He’s even got app’s on there that can diagnose and discuss pretty much any ailment known to man.
One of the funniest signs I have ever seen was at a hospital in Sydney which stated that doctors and nurses were exempt from the ‘no mobiles in hospitals’ rule because they had ‘special’ phones that didn’t interfere with the equipment! I don’t know about that particular hospital, but I’m pretty sure the iphone my partner has is exactly the same as mine.
But in saying that I agree on two points. One, it’s good to let your mind wind down sometimes and two, there would be nothing more annoying to a doctor than hearing you get to the next level of ‘stick ninja’ while they are busy saving lives. Especially when they know it’s going to be another 10 long hours before they can beat the new high score.