Always on time? Punctuality is for sycophants and underdogs
These days the only people who arrive on time want something from you. Punctuality is for lapdogs, underdogs, sycophants, subordinates and real estate agents. It’s a surrender to fear.
“I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date!” Only white rabbits like me dread tardiness and believe that to be early is to be on time. That’s because punctuality is a heritable trait, and my father was scrupulously punctual. “What’s the enemy say?” was his way of asking the time. Evelyn Waugh wrote: “Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
Credit: Robin Cowcher
But I say lateness is hubris. An insult administered with minutes instead of words.
And it’s often used to flaunt rank. The star enters last, every time. It is gratifying to note that many of the great perpetrators of lateness as a power move have nothing else. Lateness is their only strategy, a bluff with nothing behind it.
When Vladimir Putin kept Angela Merkel waiting in a mirrored antechamber for three hours, I recognised it straight away as the self-aggrandising stunt of a man whose nukes had corroded and were sweating dangerously in their silos. I said to myself: “This is the type of idiot whose flagship will be sunk by a drone built in a men’s shed.”
Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Ukrainian tinkerers had drowned the Moskva. Lateness is the same type of fake bigness as the booming voice of the Wizard of Oz. A desperate swing at importance.
In pre-industrial times, before the industrialisation of time itself, days weren’t divided into increments as they are now, and temporal arrangements were a lot more approximate, generally referencing the sun or moon, and time wore a different face.
The woman I spend all my time with would have been happy in the Bronze Age, before clocks and the concept of being “on time”. She wears a watch as a sort of wicked joke, occasionally rolling her wrist and checking it to laugh at its naivety. When we go out to dinner, I’m always freshly shaved and first out the door. I wait in the car until she meanders out of the house smelling gorgeous. By then I’m running my fingers impatiently through my stubble. And it’s not being kept waiting that riles me, as much as being late.
We rarely ever get to someone’s place without me being all het up and ornery about being late. This orneriness would rank as one of the top eight reasons people think I’m a prick. But I can’t help it. To the ultra-punctual, being dragged into lateness is as shameful as being coerced into vandalising fountains or gaslighting orphans.
Horatio Nelson maintained his success was due to being a quarter-hour early to everything. I’ve never had that option since marrying and becoming a father. To paraphrase Philip Larkin: “They make you late, your wife and kids …”
Recently, I’ve noticed that the tardy are being sold indulgences by psychologists who are positing a new theory that they might be suffering from “time blindness”, a temporal perception difference associated with various mental health disorders.
So, in essence, what these psychologists are saying is that laggards are ill and we punctuals who are kept waiting by them are clock-watching killjoys too mean-hearted to show them compassion as they slog along in their fog of hours. In answer to this I say the modern impulse to tell people their behaviour and circumstance are not their own fault has reached flights of fancy beyond Dante and Bosch. Selling blamelessness is easier than selling beer and isn’t taxed at anything like the rate. It’s the boom industry of the first world.
Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights: not a clock in sight.
But let’s ignore the psychologists. (It gets easier with practice, believe me.) In truth, late people are bad people. They are either working an angle or they don’t give two hoots about you is the bedrock, hardline, take-home fact of the matter. They’ve made a judgment that your minutes are not as valuable as theirs. Continual lateness is their verdict that you’re somewhere way down the pecking order. The wretch who keeps you twiddling your thumbs and checking your watch while drinking your third coffee has decided you’re a peasant, at best, and appointed themselves a baronet, at least.
But, then, I don’t know … maybe lateness galls me because my innate punctuality makes it the only type of hubris at which I can’t excel. Maybe, given time, I could learn to burst into a pub honking transparently false apologies while joyously atingle at being waited on.