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"Timing is everything" normally refers to comedians. When Henny Youngman said, "Take my wife... please," there needed to be a beat or two before the "please," otherwise there was no joke.

Music, we know, is nothing but timing. If a chamber group playing a Mozart string quartet missed their cues, they would sound like a middle-school band tuning up. But of course timing is essential in almost every human situation. It's a part of most decisions we make, from when to take a pill to whether to tell your spouse at dinner tonight or breakfast tomorrow about the right front fender that was perfectly fine when you left the house this morning.

But the phrase "timing is everything" does not mean it is everything good. Timing used for one person's satisfaction is often to another's disadvantage, a phenomenon so pervasive that that we don't always realize it's happening. Take dinner in a nice restaurant, for instance. Waiters have to be masters of timing, including deciding how many quarters of an hour to let you wait for their return after he or she has asked, "Do you need a few more minutes to decide?"

The trigger for them to come back and take your order is the sight of four faces at your table looking around, chins up, like a nest full of baby robins searching for their parents bringing worms. At that point they decide it's OK to put in an appearance with pencil and order pad. As an added timing twist, after your main course has arrived the waiter materializes at your table when everyone is busily chewing, and asks, "How is everything?"

OK, you have two choices: First, you suspect that he asked the question with all the sincerity of the "Have a nice day" you get from the checkout kid at the supermarket, but to be polite you want to answer. With your mouth full of chicken and roasted potatoes, you stretch your lips into a tight smile and hold it while you nod once or twice and waggle your eyebrows up-and-down.

Or, if you want to go all out and be as responsive as possible -- even though the chicken was not quite hot enough -- you stop chewing and carefully utter "fime." You try not to drool in the process. Either way, the waiter thinks "Yes! Gotcha!" He walks away feeling that sometimes this is a great job.

But perhaps the true master of the ill-timed question is your dentist. I have been going to the same one for 15 years. We are on a first-name basis, but not quite personal friends. Sometimes we stop to chat if we bump into each other at lunch in the Manalapan Diner. He seems to be a friendly fellow.

Everything changes when I am in his office stretched out on the chair in Room 4 ready to have my aching molar attended to. Let's take inventory -- I'm wearing a crinkly paper bib; I am staring up at the searchlight mounted over my head; there are four fat cotton cylinders stuffed into my cheeks, chipmunk style; and there is a suction tube hooked into my gaping mouth that I fear is going to suck out my tongue and empty it into the gurgling round sink by my side. I am just this side of panic.

I understand that this unmanageable state of affairs is a necessary preparation for the procedure about to happen. But now my dentist-friend's semester of Advanced Training in Subtle Sadism kicks in. After I have been immobilized 20 minutes, my mouth wide open, tongue drying up and jaws aching, he finishes laughing at a long joke with the patient in Room 2 and bustles in to see me ready to drop the timing bomb. As he pulls on his surgical gloves, he asks, "So, Bernie, where'd you go on vacation this year?" In this situation, I can't even mouth some version of "fime." All I can manage is, "Auaaah-uh."

My dentist either understands that I went to Arizona, or pretends to, with a generic, "I hear it's nice there." Perhaps dentists have the ability to understand a patient's grunt the way a pharmacist can decipher a doctor's prescription. It's troubling, though, that I will have to give him the same unintelligible muddle of vowels when he tests how well the Novocain has taken hold by saying, "Let me know if this hurts."

Oh well, at least he has a soothing Mozart string quartet playing on the intercom.

Bernard Jacks is a freelance humor writer who lives in Marlboro.