WASTE MY TIME,WASTE MY LIFE

Louis XVIII once proclaimed punctuality to be “the politeness of kings.” Flash-forward a couple hundred years, and in the 21stcentury, punctuality is all but dead. I blame the cell phone for turning us into a society of the tardy. While it used to be polite to show up at the appointed hour, merely texting to say you’ll be late is the new standard. This trend leaves holdouts starving in the corridors of restaurants, which won’t seat you until “your whole party has arrived.”

It’s not just our social lives that suffer because punctuality has fallen out of favour; some people have even brought this contempt for promptness to the workplace. I once set a dinner meeting with a colleague for 6 p.m. I showed up for the reservation five minutes early. Sadly, the man I was there to meet texted at 6:02 to announce the hockey game he was watching went long. It wasn’t even a playoff game.

I waited alone for a full 30 minutes, as the servers shot pitying glances my way. I felt so selfconscious that when a nice waiter refilled my water, I blurted, “I want you to know the man I am waiting for is not a date. I only stayed because it’s a work thing. If it was a date, I would have gone home by now.” He responded with a skeptical smile.

In 2017, when one voices concerns about lateness, it’s seen as a character flaw. I once had a loved one brand me as “self-centred,” because I asked her to stop showing up 40 minutes behind. “I always text you how late I’m going to be, so what’s your problem?” she demanded.

As a virtue, it is easy to dismiss punctuality as unsexy. Even the word itself sounds frumpy and clunky. But it matters. Because time is the real currency of human existence. When we strip life to the basics, time is all we really have. When someone wastes your time, they are, therefore, wasting your life. When a person wastes your time because they would rather watch a YouTube makeup tutorial than be punctual, they are sending you the message that their time is more important than yours. Taken to its logical extension, they are declaring their life to be more important than yours.

Punctuality matters.