Last week I got an email from an irate teacher friend who said a young friend of his needed last-minute help with her thesis before submission to her university. My friend did a small rant about our people always doing stuff at the last minute. Of course, this was a generalisation on his side, nonetheless, very sadly accurate. We both agreed to examine the endemic affliction known as ‘last-minute’ which seems to particularly affect our people these days.
Why do some folks always leave things to the very last minute? Why are some people always late? Some years ago, I was in hearing distance when an acquaintance commented rather sharply about a common friend, “Oh that Pennyla! She’ll be late for her own funeral!” Poor Penny totally deserved the censure. She didn’t know the meaning of what it was to arrive on time for any function, whether it was a family dinner or a wedding, any public event at all and that attitude applied to private meetings too. You are all familiar with the friend who comes late to dinners, meetings, church services, concerts, etc. Most of the time it’s someone else’s fault: the bus came late, the alarm didn’t go off, and the meterman turned up most unexpectedly. Like living in a house with the homework-eating dog, the friend who is always late seems to be surrounded by people and things that collaborate to make her or him late.
I know a group of people from a West African country who can take the cake when it comes to lateness. Sometimes their church services begin a full hour after the stated time because that is when people saunter in, unhurriedly and totally unconcerned about their tardiness. At the wedding of one of their number, the guests were astonished that it was not only the bride that was late, even the bridegroom was ostensibly late as well! It’s quite admirable in a perverted way that a whole community can be so oblivious of time and its demands. But I wouldn’t recommend that approach to time in any century.
I affirm that the numbers of last-minute people have increased in our generation. It is obvious in the road rage we witness these days. Everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere, but few practise the wisdom to start out early and reach before rush hour starts. It can be applied to the rest of life. Start early and give yourself enough time to finish the job. If you have extra time left over, you can always utilise that to edit your work and refine it further so that the end result is a product you would be proud of.
Father’s generation were the type who got to office a good ten or fifteen minutes before it opened. The majority of fathers in his generation were trained thus. It must be the education they had received as well as parental teaching. The young daughter of one of Father’s friends found the early bird habits of her father very annoying especially when it was applied on Sunday mornings. This was back in the day when Sunday services took place at 8.30 am or 9.00 am, and all members of the family were dependent on the one family car which was driven by the father. The young girl, it was reported, would ask her father if it was his turn to ring the church bell that day since he was in such a hurry to get to church. We all laughed back then, and we passed the anecdote around and had a good second laugh at Uncle being admonished by his own progeny. However, with the older generation dying out, the disrespect for punctuality, and the habit of working behind time seems to be on the rise.
Try, really try to be on time. Or even better, be before time. Make time your friend, not your foe. Get it to work for you, not against you. Eventually your best work will be the one completed with enough time on your hands to plan and to execute with confidence and without using short-cuts. There really is nothing cool about being a last-minute person. It won’t win prizes anywhere.
