A Reformed Late Person’s Guide to Being on Time
Time has become fluid in the pandemic. Except when there’s a Zoom meeting.
The other day I had a meeting on Zoom and one of the participants was three minutes late. The other person in the meeting and I filled those three minutes puzzling over what calamity must have occurred to cause this lateness. Was the missing person in some peril? Was he… dead? The meeting was at 11! It was already 11:02! 11:03! Should we call someone? Alert the authorities?
This is a state of anxiety specific to this moment in time. In the history of human meetings — that is, human, in-person, flesh-to-flesh meetings, in a real place, in the real world— no meeting has ever begun on time. Getting together is an imprecise science. To begin with, there’s the issue of traffic. The time it might take to get from Point A (your location) to Point B (the meeting) is infinitely variable, even if you calculate carefully. No one wants to be ridiculously early, so you strategize how to arrive close — or close-ish — to the appointed hour. But, goddamn it, you get stuck behind a garbage truck. Or you realize you have to stop for gas. Or you have trouble parking. Waze warns you of police activity. You take a detour. You arrive and then need a few minutes in the parking lot to refresh your lipstick and fluff your hair. That’s ok…
