As a rule, I’m an easy-going guy. Hardly anything gets my goat, ruffles my
feathers or raises even a single hackle. I always try to put myself in the other fellow’s
shoes, and am always prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt. There is only one
area in which I give no quarter. If it were up to me, lack of punctuality would be a
felony. And while I might not make it a capital crime, I wouldn’t think twice about
tossing the terminally late in the cooler for 10 or 20 years; preferably in solitary
confinement, so that they wouldn’t be distracted while mulling over their anti-social
behavior.
Where punctuality is concerned, my motto is: Better half an hour early than 10
minutes late. They’re words I live by, and so should the rest of you.
When you live in Los Angeles, as I do, people are constantly arriving late and
then using traffic as their excuse, as if they had no reason on earth to expect there might
actually be other cars on the road. So, first they insult you by keeping you waiting, and
then they follow up by insulting your intelligence. Do they imagine that I, who somehow
managed to arrive on time, came by helicopter?
When my wife catches me fuming about these inconsiderate louts, she’ll
invariably suggest I should always take along something to read. Being, like Professor
Higgins, a very reasonable man, I point out that if I wanted to read, I’d have stayed home
in my easy chair. Perhaps it’s a gender thing. Maybe women simply aren’t aware that
when people keep you waiting, they might just as well spit in your eye. It’s their way of
saying that they’re more important than you, and that you’re lucky they bothered showing
up at all.
How do I know this? Easy. These same people are never late when they’re going
to meet their boss or a potential employer or somebody from whom they want to borrow
money.
Or take Marilyn Monroe. When she became a star, she was notorious for her
tardiness. She would regularly keep an entire movie company standing around waiting
for her to show up three or four hours late. People would rationalize her boorishness.
They’d say she was nervous, even frightened, about facing the camera. So how was it
that she was absolutely punctual during those years when she was still a starlet, with
small roles in movies like “The Asphalt Jungle” and “All About Eve”? It was only when
she became the 800-pound gorilla and couldn’t be fired that, all of a sudden, she
developed this phobia where punctuality was concerned.