So what's the deal with - short TAT?

A couple of days ago I took my mom to the ER because of sudden back pain.  We live in a town of ~20,000 and have a 100-bed hospital with a fully staffed ER.  We were the ONLY ones in the waiting room.  It took 1-1/2 hours to be seen by a triage nurse, 1 hour to be escorted to an ER room, 1 hour to be seen by a nurse (never seen by an MD), and 2 hours for a different nurse to wander distractedly into the room with discharge/followup instructions.  There were at least 20 employees who seemed to be frightfully busy looking at computer screens.  All the patient rooms were empty; we were the only patients in the whole department.

I had been up for 15 hours, driven 200 miles that day, and was famished, so keeping calm during all this waiting was an act of supreme will.  Once you're put in a room, the signs say you're not allowed to leave it until discharged.  Going into the hallway is strictly forbidden because of privacy issues (I understand why this is so).  My worst error in judgment was to leave the room and approach a nurse (while we were waiting to be discharged) to ask if they could PLEASE move things along even though I appreciated that they were all very, very busy (no, I didn't roll my eyes).  She arrogantly responded that they would get around to it when they got around to it (what the heck does THAT mean?).  Grrrrr

So my question is this:  Why the heck do we have 1-minute TATs for these people?  The only place where hospital personnel move quickly is on TV.