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I'd argue that obsessing about timeliness is of itself evidence of being high-strung or high-maintenance.

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.




> 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...


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.




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