Photo by Cynthia Larsen
Comments on Punctuality (It’s About Time!)
What’s been on my mind…lately
By Ed Goldman
A few months ago I arrived 10 minutes late to do a magazine interview with an executive known to be hard to reach. He was surprisingly OK with it—I’m thinking my offer to mow his lawn, wash his car and walk his puffins for a year mollified whatever anger he might have initially felt—but I wasn’t.
I felt like I was on the receiving end of that familiar lecture, “You had just ONE THING TO DO… .” Of course, I had more than a single task: I had to conduct a fairly sensitive interview (it came with cultural pitfalls if I misstated something), review my notes immediately afterward, then write the story, which contained a verbatim Q&A section I’d recorded with a pen instead of tape recorder (by design).
Clockin’ spiel
The story had a happy enough ending: my editor liked it—and so, amazingly, did my elusive interviewee. But I was angry with myself about being late.
From what I’ve been told, my sense of punctuality began in utero: I was born on the exact day my mom’s doctors said I’d be. I wouldn’t blame you for scoffing if this had been a caesarean delivery—because unless those are performed as a last-minute option, they can be scheduled with far more accuracy than a license-renewal appointment. But no, I popped out naturally (and au naturel, needless to add).
Those of us who weren’t home-schooled or raised by wolves probably first learned to be on time in kindergarten. And while I was rarely late for school in my el-hi epoch, I can’t say it was a hallmark of my subsequent college life.
But my early years as a journalist taught me the value of showing up on time (as well as just showing the hell up). Since almost every story I went out to cover was in a location new to me, I got in the habit of going to the destination in advance. And when I was assigned a longer-range story, as opposed to “spot news” (an event in progress) I’d even go to the destination a day in advance, just to avoid getting lost at the last minute.
I still do this—especially when I’m set to interview someone at an office “campus” somewhere in the amorphous suburbs, where just finding the address on the correct building might have challenged Vasco da Gama. Even if he’d had GPS installed in his caravel.
Theatre classes taught me the craft of listening—or at least appearing to do so, which is even more important to a journalist than punctuality—but was another field demanding you show up on time or, more specifically, on cue. Like when someone onstage says, “I think I hear him walking up the stairs now,” you’d better be ready to enter the stage immediately if you’re portraying that someone.
I was in a play once where that was the exact line and I was the one saying it. But the actor didn’t come through the door on my cue. It was the precise moment I developed my improv skills, such as they are. After a moment I said, “I guess I was mistaken. It must have been something else I heard.” I then did about 45 seconds of adlibbing what that “something else” might have been when the actor finally burst through the door.
No slouch himself, he said, “Sorry I’m late. I ran up the stairs then realized I’d left my keys in the car, so I ran back down.” “Oh, good,” I said, relieved he was going along with the instant rewrite of the play, “then I really did hear you walking up the stairs.” Egging it along, he said, “Yes, but you mustn’t have heard me run back down then back up again.” He was giving me a sly look, as though this was great fun. I wanted to punch him in his smirky face—oh, sorry, I mean I wanted to douse his lights—but I managed to squeak out, “Yes, I apparently have chronic staircase-hearing challenges.” For some reason, the audience picked up what was happening and that last line earned me laughter and applause.
It was also an early lesson in punctuality. And convinces me that if I’m ever referred to as “the late Ed Goldman” it’ll only be because I’m dead.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
