When you had to wait a long time for someone or something

IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card 405 with Model Answer:

Describe an occasion when you had to wait a long time for someone or something to arrive.

You should say:

• who or what you were waiting for
  
• how long you had to wait
• why you had to wait a long time

and explain how you felt about waiting for a long time.

[You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]

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Model Answer:

Thank you for this great topic. Today, I would like to talk about an occasion when I had to take my mother to a doctor and wait for him for a long time to arrive at his chamber.

My mother has been suffering from a chronic orthopaedic problem for a couple of years. And for that reason, I have to take her to a doctor every once in a while. Luckily, of course, this never really creates any problem for us since we visit the same doctor (very much like a “family” doctor) for her treatment whenever there is a need. In other words, I don’t really have to make any kind of prior appointment with that doctor whenever we need to see him.

But, unfortunately, things became a bit tricky when our regular doctor needed to leave the country for some kind of professional training in a foreign country. Of course, before leaving the country, he fixed another doctor for us and assured us that everything was going to be fine. But, our very first appointment and meeting with the new doctor was everything but “fine”. In fact, our first appointment was set for 6:00 pm, but he barely made it at around 9:00 pm, when my elderly mother was about to leave the doctor’s chamber, thinking that the doctor was never going to show up on that night.

Of course, I kept asking the office staff there about the possible arrival time of the orthopaedic doctor every 30 minutes or so, but they kept telling me that he was going to be late because he needed to perform some surgical operations on a couple of patients. By the way, our new orthopaedic doctor was also an orthopaedic surgeon.

Anyway, we felt really frustrated with the doctor because of keeping us waiting for such a long period of time. But, then, we also told to ourselves that some other and more seriously injured patients needed him, and so, it wasn’t exactly the fault of the doctor as we had initially thought.