Opinion: Lateness isn’t always your fault. And really, except for rocket launches, does five minutes one way or the other really affect much?

“Lateness happened to me.”

That, I’m told, is the idiomatic expression used by the Japanese when arriving at an appointment later than anticipated. It’s kind of perfect, isn’t it? I mean, the oddest things can derail a timely arrival.

Ducklings on the causeway. Alternating single lane traffic on the bridge. Dentist discovers not one, but two, cavities. Oftentimes, the matter is entirely out of your control. Commuting is always a jump ball. The domino effect of one glitch can ripple through vast communities. Think for one moment about bridges or tunnels. Bottlenecks! Lateness isn’t always your fault. And really, except for rocket launches, does five minutes one way or the other really affect much?

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In Japan, if your train is even slightly late, the train company issues a chien shōei sho — a certificate of lateness that you can present to your employer. The same goes for Germany. If a passenger train arrives at its station later than scheduled, you can request a bescheinigun über Zugverspätung, which translates to a certificate about train delay. The idea behind all of this is that, well, the idea is that “lateness happened to you.”

We place a premium on punctuality but it wasn’t so long ago that time was a more fluid construct. In fact, Canada — immense, and tri-coastal — didn’t even have time zones until 1885. It was only when we had a continent-spanning railway that we had a pressing need to synchronize clocks to geography. And we only got them because of the Canadian Pacific Railway and because someone ended up missing a train and spent a cold night in a train station.

Due to timetable confusion, Sir Sandford Fleming, Canada’s foremost railway construction engineer and surveyor, missed his train. It was on that long, cold night in an empty train station that he began to appreciate that timetables needed to be systematized. He began advocating 24 global time zones and for the standardization of clocks based on Greenwich Mean Time.

Canada can’t lay claim to having invented standardized time but it was a Canadian’s efforts that resulted in the adoption of international standard time.

The United States got time zones in late 1883, several months before Canada. The concept of time zones had been championed by Charles Dowd, a school principal, 11 years earlier. The idea was considered a New World revolution and there was reluctance to adopt the idea. The Old World — Europe — didn’t have the same need for time zones. Countries like Canada and the United States, however, cover massive distance from east to west, in fact, ranging from 52* W to 141* W. Solar time, it should be noted, differs by one minute per every 18 kilometres. Back in the mid-1800s, the chance of covering more than 18k in a day was scant. The idea of ‘noon, a week from now’ was a very flexible construct, indeed.

Today, however, we live by something called International Atomic Time. Across the globe, hundreds of atomic oscillators tick and tock away, measuring ‘tempus fugit’. These measurements are correlated to the rotation of the earth, something called UTC — Co-ordinated Universal Time. The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, runs this operation and dispenses the data to countries who then adjust the figures based on their geo-position on the globe.

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Personally, I cleave to the club of approximates. In my books, five minutes late isn’t late at all. This, in my humble opinion, is the difference between clocks, maybe not atomic clocks, but my microwave clock versus my bedroom clock. Stringent punctuality isn’t the hallmark of godliness. My least........

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