Wait? Hold? Call back? No, I don't have time!

I love the Internet. With a high-speed connection, I have instant access to the world. I can't tell you how often I use Internet resources every day. I find out how to spell names of important people. Is it "General David Petraeus" or some other spelling? Click. Click. Click. There it is.

I read more than a dozen newspapers a day on the Internet, many of them in Missouri but also a few European newspapers, mainly in cities we've visited over the last 40-plus years. For example, I read the twice-weekly Inverness Courier in Scotland every week. We stayed there a while a few years ago, and the online version of the Courier keeps me up-to-date with familiar places and people.

In my ever-increasing use of the Internet, however, I am discovering a side effect that I had not anticipated. Maybe you've experienced it as well.

Because the Internet is so instantaneous, I am becoming more and more impatient with the un-electronic world.

I have decided that in this Internet Age, we live in two worlds: the online world and the real world. The online world is all about speed and quick access. The real world is all about dealing with real people who have real lives of their own and who don't always answer the phone or respond to e-mails and have voice-mail greetings that are, I guess, intended to be cheerful or funny when, in fact, all I want to do is ask a question and get an answer, which I can do on the Internet with very little hassle or wait time, while the real world with real people operates on real time that includes doing other things besides catering to my every whim.

Bottom line: My patience is all but gone.

As I began to assemble my thoughts for this column, I started by going online and Googling "quotations about patience." I thought I might find a few appropriate choice words that would express my patience issues a bit more eloquently than I -- frustrated with balky computer programs and vanishing real people who, in my mind, I need to talk to right now -- might muster on my own.

Up popped a group of quotations from Franklin P. Jones that seemed to fit the bill. Franklin P. Jones churned up a lot of good quotes, and not just about patience. Here's a sampling:

"Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again."

"The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it."

"Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger."

"Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile."

"Originality is the art of concealing your source."

"The most efficient labor-saving device is still money."

"It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water."

And here's what Franklin P. Jones had to say about patience:

"You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance."

Interestingly, you can substitute many things for "children" in that quote and still have a decent quote.

Doctors, for example, the kind who don't keep appointments. You can learn many things from doctors. How much patience you have, for instance. See how it works?

Here's something else I learned at answers.com about Franklin P. Jones: No one knows who he was. There are several notions, most of them placing him in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. How curious it is that someone whose quotes are collected on the Internet would have such a vague background.

I'll bet if I spent several hours on the Internet I could track down a clearer picture of this mysterious Franklin P. Jones. And I would if I had the patience.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.