Lately, however, the magazine has veered off into a weird self-help cul-de-sac about human behaviour, as if the species that invented traffic jams, subscription services and the addictive algorithm has any moral authority left to explain itself.
A recent issue surveyed the science of why certain humans are habitually late, and the researchers were remarkably generous. They identified five distinct types of tardy people and assigned each one a soppy, forgiving label, as though chronic lateness were a charming quirk instead of a basic failure of respect.
Let me straighten them out.
The first group they call “optimists”, who believe a 20-minute drive only takes 12 if they want it hard enough. I call these people delusional.
Then there are the low-conscientiousness types, a phrase so mild it sounds like something you’d put on a school report to avoid upsetting the parent. I call these people disorganised, and frankly a bit rude. Disorganisation on your own time is your business. Disorganisation on mine is a decision you have made about me.
Next are the “jugglers”, who try to answer emails, find their car keys and finish a sentence at the same time, and end up completing none of the three. These people are not multitasking. They are panicking in slow motion.
Then come the “night owls”, out of step with a world that starts before 10am. I have some sympathy here, though not much. The image of soft feathers and knowing wisdom hardly befits the lazy adolescent emerging after everyone else has cleaned up and gone to work.
And finally there are the genuinely time-blind, for whom an hour is less a unit of measurement than a vague rumour. These people I forgive entirely, because I am one of them.
Sometimes I think The Boss is a combination of all five, if not a sixth category of green fingers. He can get so lost among the vegetables admiring his climbing peas and the silver beet making a scene of itself he forgets entirely that I, along with my hunger pangs, exist.
What the article entirely fails to address is the single great hypocrisy of modern civilisation: humans consider being 10 minutes late for a board meeting a moral crisis worthy of six paragraphs of peer-reviewed anguish, yet being 20 minutes late with my bowl of dry tucker barely earns a wrist slap with a damp lettuce leaf. “Oh dear, I haven’t fed the dogs.”
On the other hand, I do not actually think any of these late types are as bad as others think they are. Time is not real. It is a number humans invented and then allowed to elevate their anxieties, sometimes to the point of apoplexy.
Consider the morning walk. No dog has ever needed a defibrillator because the walk started four minutes late. I do not know what o’clock the walk is. I know it is coming, the way I know winter is coming, and when it arrives — if delayed by a late night, cold gumboots or a thunderstorm — I do not treat it as a crisis. I call it Tuesday.
Mind you, I have never once been late for a smell, and I intend to die without having learned how. Woof!
