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Time - the measurement of change
Anthony Gomes
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
International competitiveness is an optimal state being vigorously pursued to ensure Jamaica's viability in the globalised world.
Apart from the obvious factors which constitute competitiveness, such as price, quality, salesmanship, customer service, and administrative efficiency, to name a few, there remains the cardinal ingredient in the process - punctuality - that is, observing the appointed time. If this singular component is absent, the service or product, transaction or process, is likely to fail.
Punctuality permeates all aspects and activities of our lives. The essence of punctuality is time management, that is the responsibility of the individual, be they a natural person or a legal organisational entity.
Incessantly, the cry of desperation is heard: "I don't have enough time", "I can't do it in the time available", "I wish I had more time" etc. These cries usually result from acute frustration, ignoring the reality that there are only a set number of hours in each day on this planet. There will never be any more time no matter how far technology advances. The duration of each day is 23 hours 56 minutes and there are 365.25 days in each year. Habitual laggards would be happier on Mercury whose day consists of 1416 hours with 88 days in a year, or Venus where a day is 5832 hours with 224 days in a year. But chances are they would still be late, regardless of the additional time available.
At the workplace, productive hours are lost every day owing to chronic late coming. Among the favourite proffered excuses are "the minibus lef me", and "the traffic block me". etc. At the professional level, in both the private and public sectors, you can sometimes wait an hour or more for your appointment which was set by the person you came to see. The church also has not been spared. Recently, the bride at a wedding scheduled for 4:00 pm failed to arrive. At 4:45 pm the church had to be cleared to allow a wedding scheduled for 5.00 pm to proceed, after which the earlier wedding then took place as the bride had eventually arrived. Needless to say, the absence of the tardy bride caused the groom to go into decline, and he had to be administered a shot of "medicinal spirit" to calm his shredded nerves!
A frequent obstacle to good time-keeping is the so-called emergency. An emergency is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as: "a sudden state of danger, conflict, etc, requiring immediate action". While there are genuine emergencies in everyone's lives, and hopefully not with any frequency, this is not so in Jamaica. Occasionally, you find someone missing from your office and on inquiry as to their whereabouts you are told they had an "emergency" to attend to. Your guest speaker arrives 30 minutes late for the function and says, "I am so sorry I'm late, but I had an emergency".
Jamaican "emergencies" can range from a genuine misfortune, to a call from the loved one that has an urgent desire that needs to be satisfied. Such are the difficulties that confront us every day in our struggle to defeat the "soon-come" mentality.
The lateness syndrome known as "Jamaica time", characterised by the expression "soon come", prompted Andrew Marshall, a leading journalist with the London Financial Times, to write in his Country Profile on Jamaica this opening sentence: "'Soon Come' is an all-purpose Jamaican phrase which can apply to the arrival of a drink, a plane or Judgement Day. It has so little sense of immediacy that it makes Manana sound like a military command."
Since time immemorial, the "Pips" of the Greenwich Time signal heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio and TV was the standard by which watches and clocks were set. However, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) ceased to be the world's timekeeper in 1975. With the advent of space travel, a more accurate source of time than Greenwich could provide, became necessary. The era of the Atomic Clock was then born.
Since 1975, the world has been
guided by Co-ordinated Universal Time (CUT) which has superseded GMT. This is not to say that GMT no longer exists, as it still provides the temporal benchmark for many organisations and countries around the world. The first Atomic Clock NBS-6 was commissioned to provide the necessary time accuracy to navigate space vehicles. Today, the latest Atomic Clock NIST-7 operates and will lose only a fraction of a second in the next three million years, and that's hard to beat! To obtain the world's most accurate time that stems from the very constant resonance frequency of atoms, you can dial the Time-a-Day service provided by the Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado at (303) 499-7111, when you will be told the time at the Greenwich meridian. Five hours should be deducted on account of Jamaica's westerly location relative to Greenwich. By international agreement, the second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the undisturbed cesium atom.
Enough said about the unfortunate problem with which we are familiar at all levels of our society. What is to be done about it? At the individual level, the adoption of a rule observed by one of Jamaica's leading businessmen is suggested. Always arrive punctually for your appointment, being prepared to wait for a quarter of an hour for the meeting, and no more. If you have not been received or attended to by that time, then leave. This assumes you are not desperately ill sitting in a doctor's waiting room or a hospital.
Time is the measurement of change for every one of us. This change can be seen each time we look in the mirror or observe the rapid maturing of our children. One day in the future, we will look back and think, "Where did all that time go?" Then it will probably be too late, as the sand in the hourglass has nearly run out. Do not delay, make the effort to get the most benefit from the time offered by each day, and astound yourself by being punctual not only for once, but for the rest of time.
Anthony Gomes
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
International competitiveness is an optimal state being vigorously pursued to ensure Jamaica's viability in the globalised world.
Apart from the obvious factors which constitute competitiveness, such as price, quality, salesmanship, customer service, and administrative efficiency, to name a few, there remains the cardinal ingredient in the process - punctuality - that is, observing the appointed time. If this singular component is absent, the service or product, transaction or process, is likely to fail.
Punctuality permeates all aspects and activities of our lives. The essence of punctuality is time management, that is the responsibility of the individual, be they a natural person or a legal organisational entity.
Incessantly, the cry of desperation is heard: "I don't have enough time", "I can't do it in the time available", "I wish I had more time" etc. These cries usually result from acute frustration, ignoring the reality that there are only a set number of hours in each day on this planet. There will never be any more time no matter how far technology advances. The duration of each day is 23 hours 56 minutes and there are 365.25 days in each year. Habitual laggards would be happier on Mercury whose day consists of 1416 hours with 88 days in a year, or Venus where a day is 5832 hours with 224 days in a year. But chances are they would still be late, regardless of the additional time available.
At the workplace, productive hours are lost every day owing to chronic late coming. Among the favourite proffered excuses are "the minibus lef me", and "the traffic block me". etc. At the professional level, in both the private and public sectors, you can sometimes wait an hour or more for your appointment which was set by the person you came to see. The church also has not been spared. Recently, the bride at a wedding scheduled for 4:00 pm failed to arrive. At 4:45 pm the church had to be cleared to allow a wedding scheduled for 5.00 pm to proceed, after which the earlier wedding then took place as the bride had eventually arrived. Needless to say, the absence of the tardy bride caused the groom to go into decline, and he had to be administered a shot of "medicinal spirit" to calm his shredded nerves!
A frequent obstacle to good time-keeping is the so-called emergency. An emergency is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as: "a sudden state of danger, conflict, etc, requiring immediate action". While there are genuine emergencies in everyone's lives, and hopefully not with any frequency, this is not so in Jamaica. Occasionally, you find someone missing from your office and on inquiry as to their whereabouts you are told they had an "emergency" to attend to. Your guest speaker arrives 30 minutes late for the function and says, "I am so sorry I'm late, but I had an emergency".
Jamaican "emergencies" can range from a genuine misfortune, to a call from the loved one that has an urgent desire that needs to be satisfied. Such are the difficulties that confront us every day in our struggle to defeat the "soon-come" mentality.
The lateness syndrome known as "Jamaica time", characterised by the expression "soon come", prompted Andrew Marshall, a leading journalist with the London Financial Times, to write in his Country Profile on Jamaica this opening sentence: "'Soon Come' is an all-purpose Jamaican phrase which can apply to the arrival of a drink, a plane or Judgement Day. It has so little sense of immediacy that it makes Manana sound like a military command."
Since time immemorial, the "Pips" of the Greenwich Time signal heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio and TV was the standard by which watches and clocks were set. However, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) ceased to be the world's timekeeper in 1975. With the advent of space travel, a more accurate source of time than Greenwich could provide, became necessary. The era of the Atomic Clock was then born.
Since 1975, the world has been
guided by Co-ordinated Universal Time (CUT) which has superseded GMT. This is not to say that GMT no longer exists, as it still provides the temporal benchmark for many organisations and countries around the world. The first Atomic Clock NBS-6 was commissioned to provide the necessary time accuracy to navigate space vehicles. Today, the latest Atomic Clock NIST-7 operates and will lose only a fraction of a second in the next three million years, and that's hard to beat! To obtain the world's most accurate time that stems from the very constant resonance frequency of atoms, you can dial the Time-a-Day service provided by the Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado at (303) 499-7111, when you will be told the time at the Greenwich meridian. Five hours should be deducted on account of Jamaica's westerly location relative to Greenwich. By international agreement, the second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the undisturbed cesium atom.
Enough said about the unfortunate problem with which we are familiar at all levels of our society. What is to be done about it? At the individual level, the adoption of a rule observed by one of Jamaica's leading businessmen is suggested. Always arrive punctually for your appointment, being prepared to wait for a quarter of an hour for the meeting, and no more. If you have not been received or attended to by that time, then leave. This assumes you are not desperately ill sitting in a doctor's waiting room or a hospital.
Time is the measurement of change for every one of us. This change can be seen each time we look in the mirror or observe the rapid maturing of our children. One day in the future, we will look back and think, "Where did all that time go?" Then it will probably be too late, as the sand in the hourglass has nearly run out. Do not delay, make the effort to get the most benefit from the time offered by each day, and astound yourself by being punctual not only for once, but for the rest of time.
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