One of my closest friends is a tall specimen of rural-born Zulu dubbed the Dark Lord. Not long after we befriended each other, we attended the nuptials of a colleague in a village called Potgietersrus in the butt crack of the Limpopo province. To improve service delivery and make a better life for all the residents, it has since been renamed Mokopane.
The wedding invitation declared the commencement time to be 10am, so we agreed to leave Benoni three hours earlier to cover the roughly 260km.
While brushing my teeth around 6.55am, I peep through my window to get a visual meteorological report and spot the Dark Lord’s Opel Astra pull up outside my Lakefield townhouse. So I leave my front door slightly open as a sign for him to enter.
For five minutes I’m hurriedly getting dressed, anticipating a knock at the door. Nothing, until precisely 7am. Curious, I ask him if he has been busy with something in the car. No, he responds, he had been waiting for the agreed time. I was thoroughly impressed.
It is neither here nor there that he has since been diagnosed as being a member of the Rain Man’s clan on the neurological spectrum. His prompt disposition inspired me three years later to insist on my own wedding ceremony starting at the advertised time of midday, despite only 20% of the guests being seated.
I used to hallucinate that I belonged to the 10% who are prompt, but it has become apparent to me that I am only strictly on time half the time
We live in a world that treats time as a vague suggestion. This goes all the way up to the highest office in the land. If the presidency advertises an address to the nation at 7pm, that’s a good time to take a shower, get into your pyjamas and fix yourself a sandwich.
The fellow with the pearly whites that Gen Z fondly refers to as Cupcake will typically be saying, “Good evening, my fellow South Africans” around 7.45pm.
This is not a slight on our president. I reckon he is in sync with the rhythm of the nation. If he started presidential addresses on time, 90% of citizens would miss the riveting, informative content of his speeches.
I used to hallucinate that I belonged to the 10% who are prompt, but it has become apparent to me that I am only strictly on time half the time. In this regard, I am one of the majority of folks who proudly beat their chests about their timekeeping despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Consistent with most other aspects of our lives, there is a disconnect between our perceptions and reality. For instance, we believe we’re great at our jobs when all the KPIs (key performance indicators) tell a different story. We believe we’re neat people even as our public spaces are buried in litter.
The millions who frequent churches, mosques and synagogues believe that they’re generous, virtuous children of the almighty, even as millions of children go to bed on empty stomachs.
Social media is replete with posts signalling social justice virtue despite overwhelming evidence of rabid jingoism and bigotry. Self-delusion is the cornerstone of human reality.
There are myriad explanations for my constant tardiness in my bag of excuses, from how busy I am to unforeseen external forces. The ugly truth, though, is that I probably don’t respect other people’s time nearly as much as I should
Anyway, let me step off the judgmental soapbox and get back to the lighter topic of our collective tardiness. This column was inspired by an incident last Wednesday. I had a 10am appointment with a lifelong political activist and former cabinet minister I have admired for four decades. As she received me at the entrance to her home at 10.02am, I apologised profusely for being late.
Reflecting on that moment afterwards, it occurred to me that I have been late for appointments with my own mother by about 15 minutes on average in the last 30-odd years of my adult life without apologising as much as I did on Wednesday.
The only explanation for the disparity in my behaviour towards my mother and a politician left me with a source of great internal discord. I hate the thought that I think the former minister’s time is somehow more valuable than my own mother’s.
There are myriad explanations for my constant tardiness in my bag of excuses, from how busy I am to unforeseen external forces. The ugly truth, though, is that I probably don’t respect other people’s time nearly as much as I should.
Perhaps the strange behaviour of Bab’ Ntenza in my neighbourhood in Hammarsdale could be explained by him having had the same epiphany. Every Sunday morning he would pull out of the driveway at 7.30am and head to church, regardless of whether his wife was still locking up the house.
I need to do better. We all do.
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