Excuse me, do you have the time?

My radio alarm clock is indicating 12.30am while my watch shows 12.28am. I know my watch is 5 minutes faster than the clock in my office and the alarm clock is a few minutes faster than the former simply because I have difficulties waking up in the morning.

And I dislike being late.

Well, actually I hate waiting for people as I feel like they somehow have total disregard of the other party’s time by being fashionably late. And you know what they say about doing unto others what they do unto you… (Remember THE Miss Righteous-ness from the cinema?)

But often, when you know that the time shown is ahead of the ‘real time’, you actually don’t make much effort to hurry up.

And the Malaysian mentality is always somewhat along the line of: since whoever I'm going to meet is going to be late anyway, so why bother being punctual?

“Just around the corner, traffic jam-lah” must be high on top of the list of reasonings that we use for not being on time. When the actual fact is that there is not one normal school-cum-working day when the streets of KL are not jammed up during rush hour.

I think we really should come up with some better defense the next time around since this excuse is getting pretty stale.

How about my dog swallowed the car key? Since dogs are capable of eating a child’s homework, I don’t see why bosses or important clients won’t buy that excuse.

So back to the issue of time, a couple of months ago, the battery on my watch went kaput and obviously, that meant that the time shown after that was never the same again.

That is assuming that the initial time was indeed, the correct time.

So can anyone tell me exactly what is the time now?

"The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it." – Franklin P. Jones

Dazed,