Your time is NOT more important than mine

There must have been thousands of stories written about how technology has bred unpunctuality. With the click of a send button, an SMS arrives in place of the friend who is supposed to meet you at the stipulated time.

Generally, I am quite a punctual person. I won't say there haven't been slips but on the whole, if I'm supposed to meet you at 2pm, you can find me where I'm supposed to be anytime between 1.50pm and 2.10pm. This also means that my threshold when it comes to waiting for friends is also around 10-15 minutes.

I don't see why it's so difficult. It boils down to basic respect and manners. If you're meeting me at 8pm and you called me at 7.30pm to tell me you're leaving the office now, you can be sure I will be pissed off when I call you at 8.05pm, expecting you to be coming up the building, only to discover that you had just left the office. And your flimsy excuse is that you were so busy.

If you're that busy, just don't bother arranging to meet up. I've better things to do with my time than waste it waiting for people who don't have the decency to respect mine.

When I was staying in hall in university, I had this neighbour who would be sitting at her laptop at 7pm when she was supposed to meet her friends at 7pm. Apparently, all her friends never show up on time and can be as late as an hour, if not more. The entire group had developed the habit of trying to be later than the rest so she wouldn't be the one waiting.

Say it with me, what the fuck?

I have zero interest in breeding such a ill-mannered system. I do not believe in rubber time and I think I've wasted enough of my life waiting for people for really no good reason at all, and I've seriously had it. So don't blame me if you pull that kind of stunt on me and arrive to find that I've gone off.