Old magazines: Welcome distraction from a tense present and future

Sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, anticipating a painful stint in the chair, is nerve-racking at the best of times. The minutes leading up to the possibility of acute discomfort are often filled up by imbibing useless information from dogeared back issues of magazines.

That those very pages had been thumbed through by countless other souls similarly tormented by the prospect of their teeth being drilled give patients a reassuring sense of camaraderie and common suffering.

If the reading materials in these places are replaced every week with squeaky clean new ones because health safety officials feel that they contain bacteria due to over-handling, it could rob these impersonal waiting areas of the last bit of humanness.

Those moments of blank contemplation — as waiting areas often do not allow mobiles or provide Wi-Fi — would make the patients even more acutely aware of their situation and imminent suffering. Then there is the added benefit of enforced disbursal of information, as many people may not have had the time or inclination to read anything at all in those publications had they not been subjected to a mandatory wait.

Minds desperately crying out for diversion are remarkably receptive to even the most dated news and insights on an incredibly wide variety of subjects, enriching themselves even while contemplating an ordeal.

Besides, if indeed repeated handling makes magazines a health hazard, there should be equal consternation about other types of papers that have a propensity to pass through many hands, that too, not merely in doctors’ chambers.

By that logic, signs warning of possible bacterial infection should immediately be put on currency notes — even plastic versions will not mitigate that risk — envelopes and couriered parcels