Each person and groups of people care about things differently, and something that may be considered essential in social relations for some, may be unimportant to others, and that may be the case even with people from countries known to be more strict with punctuality.

Besides, there’s always a danger in generalizing, and even in situations when groups of people act with the same disregard for punctuality, such as in KK and Levine’s experiences, one can’t blame hundreds of thousands of people for the behavior of a few dozen.

By the way, doesn’t it sound a bit cynical from those “Brazilian friends” to say “Yes, that is typical Brazilian behavior”? Isn’t it pettiness to tag peoples as lazy, rude, etc, even when we do that to the people of our own country?

For working with my volunteers, employees and collaborators, as soon as I know them well, I try to convey that, to the extent that we’re comfortable with it, we can work at least somewhat on event time. This means that no one has to apologize for being 10 minutes late, and if you’re going to be later, its fine to just call or leave a message that something came up, and if we are making a lot of headway on a project, then if everyone agrees we can reschedule what we were going to do the rest of the afternoon to keep going with this project. Or if our meeting was originally 3-4, but we’re not done by 4, I’ll try to resched what I had at 4 to stay to answer all your q’s. If you’re my co-worker and you’re working in your office anyways with plenty to keep you busy and I’m 20 minutes late, then its no big deal since you’ll understand that I was on event-time and needed to finish my prior event, its not like I stood you up at a street-corner, and often you’re just as glad to have 20 minutes to finish your prior meeting which probably ran over since you’re like me, or have time to grab a coffee across the street — ACCKKKKK!!!!!! Fights ensue, misery, why are you always late!

If I lived in Brazil, I’d fit right in. But I don’t, and so I do try to work by clock time. Except some people get it. I thus learn to figure out who is like me and appreciates the flexibility of event time. Perhaps this sounds like a lot of work. Why keep track of which friends/co-workers are okay with event time, instead, just have one standard, clock time for everyone? Because clock time isn’t me. The freedom of getting to live at least part of the time by event time is too helpful for me, and I thus try to learn how to minimize annoying others by learning what works for them.

The biggest problem is friends and significant others who think that my being late means something more than that I booked too tightly and my prior event ran over. They think it means I’m ambivalent about our meeting, don’t value them as a co-worker or friend, that I wanted to send some kind of message by being late. This flabbergasts me. The message is that I was overly optimistic about how long my prior event would take. That’s the deep secret. And then they have to face the mystery, why I stay and prolong the current meeting. Its because event time says you stay with the current event until the job reaches its own termination point, not until the originally scheduled end time is reached. For people on clock time, this may seem doubly strange.

It evokes a certain sense of flexibility and responsiveness that translates to relationships and expectations. Time is situational, life is situational, and not up to anyone in particular. It can be annoying as all hell, but it also can be really fun and adventurous if you let it be.

If you’re really stuck and need to get to the post office (which does, like all government offices, close bureaucratically at precisely 16:00:00:01), grab a taxi. Taxis will run over anyone to get you there on time.

Japan is the opposite of a rubber time country. If a train’s going to be 30 seconds late, there’s someone announcing it on the platform.