Time, where does it all go?

"the _____ will begin promptly at 8:30 pm on 4/30/08"
How many times have we all seen this line, or some derivation thereof, and then had the next thought:
"eh, I don’t have to be there until 9:00 at least, the *name of event here* will be on *insert ethnic group here*-time.”
In my current context the ethnic group in question is “Jewish”, but this is not the first group which I’ve belonged to that had difficulty with attending events in a timely fashion… my family is Ghanaian which means that when a fellow Ghanaian friend showed up 3 hours late to my 8 or 9th birthday party when I was a kid, there was only minor grumbling. To show up on time for a Ghanaian event is asking to wait 4 hours while the hosts awkwardly tiptoe around the question, “what’s wrong with these people? They’ve been around white people too long!” But being “time-challenged” doesn’t only plague those from the dark continent Ecuadorian time is roughly the same, Italian time is later, Jewish time varies depending on where the person is from (but is always late), and though I can’t speak for all of China add an hour for Cantonese time.
Today I went to a vort for one of my rabbi’s daughters (she was behind a bulletproof mechitza) me and 10 or so other yeshiva bochrim showed up about 30 minutes after the scheduled time thinking that we’d factored in Jewish time. What we forgot to factor in was the fact that he’s Chassidic, to calculate Chassidic time you estimate jewish time then multiply by a factor of 2, so when we got there the hall was empty… they hadn’t even set up the tables!
So this begs the question, “who the heck actually does everything on time?”
Racial/Ethnic stereotype time!
Germans, and only ze Germans. It seems to me that that while they’ve given a lot to the world (cars, beer, and expensive watches) they are in the minority when it comes to timeliness, much like lactose intolerance. I thought I was a weirdo because I can’t digest milk but most of the world is lactose intolerant, so really the 1.5 percent of the world that can digest milk are the mutant freaks… and it seems like being on time is the same, ONLY THE GERMANS ARE ON TIME. We need to take a stand, no longer shall we be shackled by unreasonable standards, after all out lateness is probably genetic, we must rise up and declare that time is dead! We are not late, we just aren’t German!
Did I mention that there were more than a few l’chaims at the vort… I’m going to sleep.

Labels: ghanaianness, jewishness, time