Re:Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
by brokenmachine on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @12:00AM
(#16426973)
> sometime that day. Or perhaps tomorrow.
That would be fine, and honestly I'd be much happier if my work was like that.
But my free time is limited and I have to be at work at 9am on Monday, no matter how long I wait for a selfish person to turn up. So I'm not going to sit there waiting for long...
Re:Why is it hard to make friends over 30? (2012)
by acjohnson55 on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @11:56PM
(#16426960)
A friend of mine moved from the East Coast to teach college in Idaho, and he made the comment that punctuality just wasn't a thing out that way. He's a historian, and he surmised that it was because Idaho never had its society fundamentally altered by industrialization and the time-keeping it required.
But yeah, I try not to get hung up on other folks' timeliness, unless there's going to be a knock-on effect. I know shit happens. I bring a book so I can put my time to good use if I have to wait. An obsession with punctuality in and of itself might be a sign that a person is optimizing what's measured rather than what's actually important.
On-time is... sometime that day. Or perhaps tomorrow. Later than that is significantly late, but why worry about an hour or two? It really is a very, very particular western culture thing to be time-obsessed: it's not specifically something that all humans do intuitively.