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If you are 5 minutes early then you are 5 minutes late

Have you ever heard the expression “If you are five minutes early then you are five minutes late”? I can’t seem to recall where I heard it. I would like to say it was one of those little pearls of wisdom my father gave me. Sadly not, as you can rest assured he is the kind of guy that will be late for his own funeral. I have lived by this so called “rule” if you will since my teens. Funnily enough this was the same time I really started to take an interest in watches. I have always felt the need to make sure I am early for appointments whatever they maybe and regardless of their importance. I am not sure if this is linked to my love of watches, but imagine that somewhere in that black hole I call my brain there is a tie in somewhere.

Where is this all going? I can hear you ask. Well, I guess what I am asking is, Are you the same? I take it that given you are reading this on the forum you too have a love of watches but does this reflect on how you view the importance of time and keeping to it? Now just to muddy the waters a little, here are a couple of issues from left field. First of all I don’t really care if others are late as long as I’m not. Secondly, knowing that mechanical watches are not as accurate as quartz watches, why do I prefer them? While we are at it I will throw it out there but I am one of those people that also sets his watch five minutes fast as if to trick my brain into thinking Sh#t I had better get a move on! So now when I do get to an appointment 10 minutes early I am in fact 15 minutes early. Ok call the OCD police now!!!

Upon reflecting on what I have just written it has occurred to me that I have probably wasted a lot of time over the years just arriving to appointments early. There is an old Estonian proverb (One for you Vlad) that says “Wasting time is stealing from oneself” I guess when you think about it there is quite a lot of truth to that. I guess we are all guilty of wasting time but on the other hand what constitutes wasting time? I will leave that argument for the philosophers of you out there. I guess our trusty mechanical time telling devices we call watches can also be called time waste indicators. Maybe I should run that one past our management at work and see if they will pick up the tab for a nice new Oris.

So what is the moral to the story? Well I am not so sure any more. I once thought that keeping good time was exactly that, keeping good time. I am now thinking that it was all a waste of time. I think it is time to turn my “Time Waste Indicator” back five minutes……….What do you think?

Brodge77

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