Punctuality

I’m sitting in the car, waiting.  A gentle Spring rain pitter-patters down the windshield, fueling the early-bursting flowers—and my rage.  Our happy orange Mazda has become a Chinese Water Torture Chamber from a 1980’s Elvira movie.  Soon my eyes will start a bout of uncontrolled spasms and before long I’ll be blathering and blubbering and seething.  Our friend is having a dinner party that starts at 6:30, and she specifically asked that we arrive early so it can start on time.  It’s 6:28 and she lives six minutes away.  We haven’t left yet, and we’re late.

When I was in drama class it was put to me like this:  “Take every minute you’re late for a rehearsal, miss a cue or show up after you’re expected and multiply it by the number of people waiting for you.”   By that calculation, if you’re only 12 seconds late for your cue in a play and there are 450 people in the audience then you’ve squandered an hour and a half.  An hour and a half from just 12 seconds!!  Now I’m sitting in the car, wondering when Jon is going to come out of the house, and I’m already calculating that we’ve lost nearly an hour by making 13 people wait for four minutes.  Yikes.

I’m being dramatic for effect.  It’s not like this dinner party was lost-productivity for a Fortune 500 company or a space shuttle launch or the opening number at the Academy Awards.  We ended up being just a few minutes late—no big deal.  We arrived at 6:36 and were actually surprised to find everyone was, in fact, waiting for us.  We were rushered (rushed and ushered) to our seats and I felt a tinge of humiliation from the raised eyebrows.  We were late.  We were guilty.  We had killed everyone’s time and we were judged. 

In 2004 we traveled through Japan.  On the last day we gave ourselves seven hours to get from a moutain-top resort in Hakone to the Narita airport, an adventure that required the use of a small toy train, a larger bullet train, a subway around Tokyo, and yet another shuttle train to the outskirts-international airport.  We arrived two hours before our flight and learned we’d missed it because there wasn’t enough time to process our luggage.  Who knew you had to go through an extensive customs procedure to leave Japan?  The next flight was the next day and in the end we were quite happy to have another chance to explore Tokyo.  Still, our error cost us hundreds of dollars as we had to find another hotel and transportation and food in the capital wasn’t cheap.   But that wasn’t about punctuality.  That was about bad timing and misinformation—and there’s a difference.

Punctuality is the art of being on time, neither early nor late.  My grandmother used to sit in an airport for up to three hours before a flight.  That’s not punctual—that’s just freaky. 

There are general rules-of-thumb regarding being on time.  If it’s a meeting or an interview, arriving ten minutes early IS being on time because arriving on time forces the engagement to begin after you’re ‘settled in’.  In high school you had to arrive in your classroom before the bell, not during the bell and not after the bell, so being punctual meant arriving 1-2 minutes before class started.  Theater always starts eight minutes after the time printed at the ticket, but arriving seven minutes after the ticket-time means you’re late because the aisles are tiny and no one wants to deal with you putting away your cell phone and coat.  That’s just gauche.

I grew up Jewish and we always joked about JST—Jewish Standard Time, which was a general excuse for everyone to be late.  Services started at 9:15 but I don’t know anyone, save a few older men, who were ever there before 9:45.  My mother and sister were known for being chronically late.  I haven’t lived with them for twenty years, so maybe they’ve improved, but I do remember that we were always the last kids picked up after school.  I’m sure there was a valid excuse.  There’s always a valid excuse.

Sometimes it’s incredibly uncomfortable to arrive on time, like, say, at a club or a hip party.  But since I rarely go to cool things like that, I can’t write about it.

Now I’m an adult and in charge of my own time.  Our bedroom clock is set twenty minutes fast so if the appointment is at one and the clock reads one then we know we’d better get moving.  The kitchen clock is 10 minutes fast (our house is so big it takes ten minutes to get from the bedroom to the kitchen, I guess).  The bathroom clock resets every time the power dips and we’re too lazy to change it so we just ignore it instead of unplugging it.  The bathroom has its own time zone.  Yes, that’s weird.

In our general mode, I’m always a little early and Jon is always a little late.  Both alternate modes are uncomfortable for both of us.  I think he’s selfish and he thinks I’m a manic people-pleaser.  We’re both right.  Our friends know we’re going to be late no matter what time they say to arrive.  The smart ones set the time early for us.  Of course, we’re smart, too, and we know who tries to manipulate our schedule to suit their selfish needs to eat at a particular moment… so nothing really works.

Late people will always be late and punctual people cannot change them.

I wish I didn’t miss the beginning of The Lion King on Broadway.  I wish I could watch trailers before movies.  I wish I could go to a dinner party without spending ten minutes waiting in the car first.  But these are bourgeois wishes and I’m not going to waste important wishes on trivialities.

As Bono said, “I cannot change the world, but I can change the world in me.”  I’m sitting in my Mazda watching the rain drip and the clock tick past 6:30 with no sign of Jon, so I decide to change my perception.  We were going to be late, but I was in the car at 6:15, so it wasn’t my fault.  I would lower those raised eyebrows with a forthright pronouncement that I did the right thing and I didn’t cause you this time-injury and I am perfect, I am perfect, I am perfect!!

Of course, no one cares if you’re perfect when you’re late.