When time is an abstract concept

One of the things that bothers me most, living here in India, is how time is valued. Or, rather, how it is not. Nobody ever seems to be on time, not the tradesman, not your business appointment, not the help or anyone else you can think of. Specifying a time for an appointment or for starting a job seems to be but a kindly suggestion, much like the "Follow traffic rules" signs in Bangalore.

In particular, I am peeved right now because of how much time I have lost over the past few days, not only because people haven't kept their appointments, but also because they haven't had the courtesy to communicate the delay and/or the cause for it. Everyone seems to think that you have endless hours to wait on them. The worst of it is when you schedule a broad swath of time, say between 10 AM and 5 PM, for someone to show up and do some work, and you have set aside other tasks to accommodate this. And 5 PM comes and goes, and nary a phone call to say, "Sorry, but we aren't able to make it today". Well, not quite the worst. The worst is when they don't even call you the next day, and you have to call to (a), find out why they didn't show up and (b), re-schedule on your own initiative. Gee, having my money in your pocket does give you a whole new outlook, doesn't it? I'm learning to avoid even the smallest deposit prior to work being started, but that doesn't work when you need stuff delivered which you've already paid for, or installation is included in the up-front price.

And then you have friends/businesspeople with whom you schedule lunch at 1 PM, and they show up, without an apology, at a quarter to two. I mean, it's not a party. Everyone has a cell phone, but it doesn't seem to occur to them to use it to communicate their tardiness. The only ones who show up on time seem to be expats. You order a piece of furniture, on the assurance that it will be ready in 7 days, and on day 8, of course you have to call them because they haven't delivered and they haven't called. Then they tell you that they will deliver in two more days, and of course it will be two more weeks before they actually do. I've even been to banks at their appointed opening hour, and had to wait because they weren't quite open. Cabs are either early(probably hoping they can start billing you unexpectedly) or late, which makes you late for other things as well. Letting your cab driver go for an hour lunch is a huge mistake, because he rarely gets back within an hour and a half. Everything you do has to be done with allowances for tardiness which, at the end of the day, means you got less done than you intended to, which is frustrating when it's a regular occurrence.

It's hard to find humor in this wholesale disregard for the value of other people's time. I used to laugh at the description of IST as "Indian Stretchable Time", but it is difficult to keep quite as sanguine an attitude when the "stretching" really messes up your day, every day. Come on, people, get with the program!