My irrational fear of counting down

Standing at the microwave oven this morning, heating up the baby's bottle, it occurred to me that I have an irrational fear of counting down. I watched the timer on the microwave oven count down from 25 seconds and it made me uncomfortable.

My mind wandered back to a sunny summer day in Cary, North Carolina in 1998. I had just checked in to my room at the Embassy Suites and having unpacked my suitcase I did what most sane business traveller would do. I got the laptop out and connected to the internet.

You know coming from Europe the concept of an unlimited local call for 75c was just phenomenal. I opened the dialer programme and a short bout of whining later and I was connected.

I launched my browser, did a quick search for an mp3 that I was looking for and clicked "save as". This was in the pre-iTunes, pre-napster, pre-broadband days of course.

So with 4MB or so to download all there was to to was wait. So I waited, and I waited and I waited. Cast your mind back to these dark days. It was painful to wait.

In times like these I had to leave the room, or turn on the TV, or do anything. Anything but sit there and watch the clock count down.

In London recently I caught myself doing something similar on the tube, or the London Underground to give it the correct title. I boarded the tube at Heathrow with a work colleague, headed for Hyde Park Corner station. I'd say we were about 2 stations in to the journey when I started working out how many stations we still needed to visit before we could get off the train.

Ditto a recent flight to Madrid. The plane had just about reached cruising altitude when I was checking my watch and working out how far from Madrid we were.

At times like these I am indeed "consumed with the end". A wise man I once met shared an insight about people who are consumed with the end. It is identified as being a clear source of stress, manifesting itself in situations like traffic, bank queues, airline check-in queues and so on.

I know I shouldn't be consumed like this and for the most part I am not. Timers bring out the worst in me. I just can't bear to look.

We've all seen those old movies where there is a huge bomb with a massive timer with an easy to read LED display, how thoughtful! The vision of the LED display counting down, maybe that's what freaks me out. Maybe I am subconsciously programmed to fear things that count down.

Now we have traffic lights and pedestrian crossings that count down to the point where it is safe to cross the street. Fine for most people but not for me.

Either way, I don't like waiting for things to reach zero. I can't bear to look.