Just in time

I remember a long time ago someone fuming in a train station in Amsterdam about the trains running late. It was a minute past due, he was expostulating to anyone who would care to listen, and his particular train hadn’t come. He was the executive type, well-groomed, attired in a three-piece suit, with a formidable attaché case in hand. He was going to be late, he kept groaning while constantly glancing at his watch, which reminded me of the hare in “Alice in Wonderland.”

This was a place that scheduled comings and goings to the precise minute. Later I would see that Japan was better, or worse, depending on how you look at it. This was a place that scheduled trains and boats and planes to the precise second.  People’s worlds got turned upside down because those trains and boats and planes were off by a few ticks. The margin of error for lateness is mind-bogglingly narrow. People expect to get to where they are going on time.  People expect to meet on time. People expect to accomplish things on time.

It’s mind-boggling, but only from our perspective. Here, when you want to schedule a dinner or get-together at 8:00 p.m., you tell everyone to be there at 7:00 p.m. You assume they’ll be late by an hour. But since the people you invite assume that, too, some of them will arrive at 9:00 p.m. It’s a strange game where the rules are not set out but are there. As with most things in this country, schedules are played by ear, or by oido, as we put it. Even appointments with doctors are not sacrosanct as I’ve personally experienced.

I thought of these things when I read that the Department of Science and Technology wants to put the notorious “Filipino time” behind us. Instead of “Filipino time,” it wants us to have “Juan time,” a pun on “one time,” a universal time for all of us based on the clock. “In these fast-paced times, a few seconds difference in time reference counts a lot. Through this campaign, I hope we can remind everyone about the importance of observing a common time reference that is the Philippine Standard Time (PST) and, of course, being on time in everything that we do,” said Science and Technology Secretary Mario Montejo.

It’s a laudable project and I wish it all the luck in the world. It will need it. It’s not the first time an initiative like this has been taken, and so far the change has been largely at the margins. PAL itself tried to change its image of “plane always late” with not completely soaring success, though competition at home and abroad has compelled it to do better. At least with international flights; the local ones remain chancy as time goes. Government and business have also intermittently exhorted Filipinos to give whole new, and quite different, meanings to “Filipino time,” an exhortation that has largely fallen on deaf ears.

To do something about “Filipino time,” you need to know where it’s coming from. I can think of two reasons for it, both deeply embedded in the psyche.

The lesser one is that it is the product of near-universal expectation in these parts. You come to a meeting an hour late because you expect others to do the same thing and you don’t want to waste your time waiting for them. I cannot claim to be innocent there, and for that very reason. Natural expectation is no trivial thing, it is in fact the one thing that makes a lot of things happen.

The bedlam in our streets is proof of it. You do not expect drivers to stay in their lanes, to observe right of way, to yield to pedestrians. On the contrary, you expect them to cut you off, to usurp the opposite lanes before a red light, to get off easily with a bribe after being flagged by a cop. So you end up doing the same thing.

The corruption in public life is proof of it. You do not expect public officials to live solely on their pay, to give you back your taxes in schools and clinics, to live simply. On the contrary, you expect them to help themselves to their budgets or pork barrels, to be the source of beneficence to friend and kin, to live the life of, well, public officials. So you end up tolerating corruption, if not doing it yourself.

Natural expectation sets the norm. In a Wonderland, Alice will always be the odd-girl out.

But the more important reason is culture. Lateness is something we got from the Spaniards. The length of lateness is directly proportional to the height of greatness, or at least of social status. Only plebeians are expected to come on time, or ahead of it. The rich and powerful are expected to arrive late. The richer and more powerful, the later. Time isn’t just a marker, it is a weapon. Being on time is not a sign of high society, it is a sign of low birth. Time hasn’t greatly diminished that valuation, it has just taken on more modern forms. To be anybody of importance, you need to be “fashionably late.”

It’s rarely articulated but it’s an underlying dynamic in meetings and socials. Of course, show biz has pushed it to absurd lengths, prima donnas turning out hours late to emphasize their importance, real or imagined. And of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Business, in particular, has its own culture that is more akin to the Western one than this one, or indeed that goes beyond national borders being a culture unto itself that executives all over the world partake of. One whose guiding principle, or driving force, is quite literally: Time is gold.

But for the most part, across the country lateness is the norm, being on time the exception. Can we change this? I think so, yes. But that’s another column. We do need to see first the obstacles that lie along the path before we can start doing things differently. Before we can start humming a different tune.

Before we can start singing, “Just in time.”