In honor of Sonic Rainbigot crossing the 1000 Upvote line: an incredibly racist statement. · 8:33pm Aug 3rd, 2014
Due in no small part to the demographics of my neighborhood, I have made a number of friends --
-- isn't that just the perfect way to open an incredibly racist statement? 'I need to immediately establish that I have friends from this group, which theoretically entitles me to say everything which comes next'? --
-- who, while they vary in age, profession, education, faith, politics, and everything else, all share a common point of origin: the Dominican Republic. Some of the friendships are closer than others. With a few, it's really just a casual chat level. For others, we go out together, have meals at each other's homes, issue invitations to family events, cover each other during emergencies and share comfort during the bad times. Different people, different connections, different levels of bond. But they're all my friends. And really, as a group, they have only two things in common, their point of origin -- and their personal clock. Because every last one of those friends operates on Dominican Time.
What's Dominican Time? It's at least half an hour later than you needed it to be.
I have never been to any of their workplaces. I don't attend classes with those who are still in school. I don't know how they operate in professional situations. But when it comes to the casual clock which helps keep friendships running smoothly, they do not operate in my time zone. There are days when they don't operate on any form of minute-measurer. There's one whom I can barely get to cooperate with a calendar.
Let's take going to see a movie together. My chosen companion for the day will be enthused for the film. Happy to go take in a little cinematic entertainment. And because she has mastered English, she knows 'starting time' quite well, at least for the dictionary definition. And because I have mastered her, I have a similar grasp on 'separate cars'. Because if I go with her, I will not see the trailers. I may not catch the first five minutes of the movie. The first ten. Thirty. Actually, we'd better just catch the next show, but she wants to hit the restroom first and now we're ten minutes late for that. Pick her up at her apartment? She will have taken a nap, but don't worry, she only needs ten minutes to get ready, but that's ten minutes in Dominican Time, so make it forty. She has an absolutely crucial phone call which she must wrap up first and it turns out to be all about the movie we're pretty much now halfway through missing. She forgot it was today. She forget it was this week. She remembered just fine, but now that she's seen what I'm wearing... And if I start to fret or tap a foot or openly consult a watch, she'll tell me not to worry so much. After all, who wants to see trailers? (Me.) The first five minutes of a movie aren't important. (Pretty much every scriptwriter would disagree.) We'll get the context of what we missed later. (Wanna bet?) And besides, if I'm really so insistent, she's sure the ushers will surely let us stay through the first part of the next show. (Only with exceptionally flirt-vulnerable ushers.)
Dinner? If you're eating out, find out what time the restaurant stops serving, don't go anywhere which requires a reservation (or which won't hold one until midnight), and if the only parking charges by the hour, one of us is picking the other up because having the car sit in the lot for that much extra time takes out appetizer and dessert. Eating in? Prepare only food which can sit on the counter for most of a night and be finished in five minutes with no contamination, illness, loss of flavor, or health inspector intervention.
Sporting event? Hope nothing interesting happened in the first inning/quarter/half of the doubleheader.
Babysitting? Occasionally, one friend will leave her kids at my apartment for a few hours so she can attend to Mom Duties without worrying about shrill voices getting in the way. What time will she be back? Eight-thirty p.m. On which day? Trick question! Should have asked about the month!
(Great kids, by the way. At the current rate, based on overrun time spent with me, when my taxes comes around next year, I may be able to claim them as dependents.)
This may be a coincidence. I admit that freely. I may just have a talent for making friends with people from the DR, but only those who giggle when they look at a clock. Maybe I'm just a little too insistent that when a movie starts at six, I'd like to be there at six. Sure: it's my fault. Let's go with that.
Or... yesterday, a number of us went to an amusement park: an event which had been planned out for about a month. The weather cooperated, our schedules linked up. Six of us (including a couple of kids) on a merry sojourn for the day, going on rides and people-sighting while trying not to spent more on concessions than we normally would have paid for the tickets. (Comped.) And naturally, because I am not fond of standing in lines for hours at a stretch, we agreed we'd get there early. Around ten in the morning. Given the ride time to the park, that meant everyone in the vehicle and in transit by nine. I wasn't the one driving.
So nine a.m. comes and goes, as I knew it would. (I was ready by eight-thirty. Because I had Hope, which is the stupidest of all treasures.) As does nine-thirty, and a number of minutes after it.
Around ten, I start making the inevitable, expected calls. One isn't up yet.
Ten-thirty. The family group has decided that's a perfect time to have breakfast.
Eleven. On the road, but there's this stop they can make on the way which could normally wait until Monday, but hey, they're passing it anyway...
I was picked up around eleven-twenty. Reached the park about twelve-thirty. The lines got there before us.
And no one was concerned about this. Or upset. Or said they were sorry about that, or took the least bit of notice, or...
We mostly had a good day at the park, even if it was a few hours shorter than it should have been. (Note to self: white upper body garment + water ride = You Are Very Stupid.) I would go again (with considerably more attention paid to wardrobe) and I would go with them, because they're my friends and they're good people to hang around an amusement park with. But...
...Dominican Time.
It's an incredibly racist statement to make.
It's also a thing.
Beware.
Incidentally, past performance? Does indicate future results. And the future will be at least thirty minutes late...
Those kinds of people (persistent lateness everywhere-it also happens with Italians, although to a lesser degree (and I say this as an Italian)) drive me absolutely nuts.
In the cinema example, I would've probably screamed at her for twenty minutes and then ditched her.
You are a far, far better person than I
Indians do it too
-Indian
Trust me, the DR's are not the only people who have a problem understanding schedules.
Myself, originining from a for now undefined middle eastern region, once went to a wedding (my cousin's), where the bride and groom were about one hour late...
and that was completely fine, because most of the guests hadn't arrived yet anyways.
That's actually a pretty common cultural thing. It's not just Dominican Republic either, many countries share that trait of the clock being a loose guideline rather than an important metric.
As I understand it, it's simply a different set of values. To people with this mindset it's important what you do, not when you do it.
To be fair, from the other side we Americans (Canadians, Japanese, Chinese, etc...) are annoying clock watchers who value being on time more than what is done. And your friends are probably just as annoyed by your constant concern with being late.
Heh, I've heard this before, about Latin America in general. My high school geography teacher used to pepper her lessons with tales from her own travels around the world. Those about Latin America always involved this kind of anti-punctuality; she'd talk about closed shops with a note saying "be right back", with no way of telling if that note was put there five minutes or two months ago.
It's also a Southern European thing, apparently. I remember this funny passage from Homage to Catalonia about the Spanish:
Maybe speaking a Romance language automatically makes you late for everything?
Then again, the French seem to be immune, to some degree.
I'd beg to differ, but maybe you shouldn't take clothing advice from a guy who listens to Steel Panther.
This more or less reflects my own experiences with folks in Puerto Rico (note: not folks from Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans I interact with in person seem to be regularly on time). I’m convinced that it’s something about the island: Either it gets into their head and makes time unimportant, or else there’s some sort of separate time continuum around the island that makes everything they do on time, but seem irresponsibly slow to everyone else.
If I didn’t work in a time-critical industry, I doubt it would bother me so much; despite not being an “islander” myself, I seem to only ever function on “Island Time,” i.e. “Don’t worry, I’ll get to it."
Don't feel guilty about not being able to stand Dominican attitudes: I cannot stand them, and I was born there, for crying out loud!
Heck: the second-to-last time I was there, twenty years ago, my father decided to surprise me with a little social party. My father must have believed me to be incredibly shallow, because I was the only boy in attendance (I was fourteen or so), and every girl was dressed to kill and eyeing me like a piece of meat. That party resulted on me not bothering to show up in the island for the next twelve years or so.
I have heard of this phenomenon many times, from people who otherwise at least never speak aloud whatever racist notions they may otherwise be harboring, and would be appalled at anyone who did, so... I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. Congrats on the 1000 upvotes though
Punctuality and the social importance of sticking to a schedule is one of those big cultural divide things.
Hmm. Maybe Rainbow Dash isn't lazy, she just functions on Pegasus Time. "The clouds will come around when they come around. No big deal, I'll handle them when they arrive."
Earth ponies also don't pay that much attention to the clocks, they live their lives by the rhythms of the earth and the tempo of their work, but they don't like ponies who leave other ponies hanging.
And unicorns, of course, love clocks and timepieces of all sorts, and are fans of calendars and journals and day planners.
You know, that may not be the best phrasing when you're making admittedly-racist commentary.
One of the trainers for my ESL job described it as China-nowism: the tendency of plans and decisions to be made at the last possible minute or later.
There were times when I would literally go to my first class of the day, find the room empty and be told "All of your classes are cancelled for the next two weeks while your students do military training." Though that was more a function of me being the least important and connected faculty member at the school. Really I should have taken the time to befriend the security guards.
As a Brazilian, I have heard this exact same thing about Brazilian Time. It isn't racist, it is just true.
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I think most of us instinctively had Rainbow as the 'whenever' member of the cast (while at the same time, going into snits whenever somepony is even a little late on her), while Twilight and Rarity are the Two Most Likely To Be Tapping Their Hooves While Making Pointed Head Gestures At The Clock.
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Fifty Shades Of Blog Posting
(Which is a trailer I've managed to miss. I think it's going to wind up as erotica for a lot of people who have nothing they can compare it to.)
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It's not being late so much as.... when there's an evening planned, I kind of like to get the entire evening in. Plus I really like a good trailer.
Beyond advice on not worrying, they've never mentioned my feelings about being on time, at least not in front of me. Maybe they're afraid of being racist.
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At one point, I secretly harbored a desire to find a DR TV channel listing grid just so I could see whether the time slots were filled with things like 'Morning News: Whenever'.
Or we could just call it Amazing Racist Time, but that's another category of scheduling joke -- and a few of the Stateside people here may have just winced.
(For everyone else: our edition of The Amazing Race is typically aired twice a year: fall-winter, winter-spring, and always on Sunday -- which means that for the first running, it is perpetually delayed by football games which never end on time and in the second, college basketball, same. You cannot set a DVR to record TAR unless you give it a three-hour window and several prayers. It was a cherished belief of some show fans that the series was kept on Sunday because we were the only ones who would put up with this season after season. They finally switched it to another weekday for the upcoming edition.)
You've pretty much described my fanfic posting schedule.
I tend to lapse into Baxil Standard Time whenever I don't have a schedule in place that people are paying me to adhere to. The sort of egregious lateness you describe, though, just strikes me as an unwillingness to rationally compromise your schedule for personal benefit. If you're paying for a movie ticket or amusement park day, might as well get your full money's worth.
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I wonder how strongly "caring about time" and economic growth/GDP of home country correlate.
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Hard to say without some serious research. Of course, the States do have their own tradition of being late -- to any war.
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Bah. The US just knows how to make a dramatic entrance.
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I think it's an island Thing. Many a time I've had friends inconvenience me with their tardiness, then laugh it off as being not their fault, it's just that they run on "Philipino Time".
Wow. Your friends would probably drive me nuts. Mainly because whenever someone else is late, I start worrying that I misremembered the time. And whether something happened to them. And the myriad potential ways I could embarrass myself in the near future. And... well, you get the idea.
Funnily enough, I never seem to feel that way about deadlines I set for myself...
There's that, and there's also metric time (comes from a friend that works in the oil industry in the Middle East-pretty much assume our M-F schedule is a Sunday-Thursday one in the Middle East), Allah akabar ("it shall be as Allah wills it"-i.e. are the bolts tight enough? "They shall be as tight as Allah allows it." Built the local buildings on concrete with too much sand? "They shall stand if Allah wills it."), and the ever popular "manana". Drove him nuts, to the point where he loved the people that actually were there-on time-and ready to work when they got there (other foreign contractors, Kurds, and Druze for the most part).
On the cinema thing (and most things like that in general), I have what I call the 15/30 rule-you can be up to fifteen minutes late without a call, 30 minutes late with. Just about all of us have cell phones, and text messaging. I've told dates that have taken months to arrange that I'm leaving when it's been over 30 minutes and I haven't heard a thing.
I actually took a class once that examined this issue from a cultural values perspective. The professor (who is Mexican, but was culturally more shaped by his studies in Britain and the US and has become adorably confused by Mexico) told us a story about an international trip he took with a class of Mexican students. As their itinerary was hyper-scheduled, he tried every single morning to get these university students to assemble at 9:00 so they could hit the road. Abysmal failure. Did not work once. With a mix of lectures, threats, and doing a sweep of people's hotel rooms, he managed to get most of them into line. But he could not get through to this one guy, one of the most popular and well-liked people in class. Out of desperation, he interceded with the guy's roommate, who told him matter-of-factly that oh, actually, he's been ready for an hour now; he's just sitting on the edge of his bed fully dressed, watching TV, chilling, and he's going to come down and make his entrance at 9:30 or so. Because he wants everyone to see the party can't start without him.
Not that I'm suggesting your friends are playing power games with you, but... wait. Is that what I'm saying? Oh dear.
But if they are, I'd guess it's not anything conscious, but something wholly subconscious and ingrained in Latin American culture. Time is something everyone can ignore because whenever they do something, the party doesn't start until the moment they show up. Which is a much more satisfying and empowering feeling than waiting around, right? And it fits together nicely with something other commenters have said: that it's not about the time you spend, but the people you're with.
My aunt is like this, although she has no connection to the Dominican. We invited her over for supper when she was visiting and told her we would start eating at five, but we didn't even set the table until around six and even then we had to wait a bit.
Having been a child of Indian immigrants... this isn't something confined to the Dominican Republic.
I and those I know who are in my position have always called it Indian time. But instead of outings with your friends, it's dinner parties and other get-togethers that you'd prefer to get in and out of as quickly as you can. When you think "dinner party," you think of something that starts at six and ends at about nine, yes? Well, if we're going by Indian time, you're being ridiculously early if you arrive around seven, and the party doesn't wind down until midnight. It's like, you say around five, and you mean around eight. I've noticed in on trips to India, not just parties here. With business stuff people are usually fine, but when it comes to parties, you'd best set your clock three hours late if you want an accurate estimation.
Oh, and congratulations on the upvotes! They're well-deserved on that fine piece of laughs.
You need to write a story with Pegasus time, but go against expectations and have Rainbow Dash waiting frantically for Fluttershy or something.
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Unicorns, of course, are uniquely well-suited for Pointed Head Gestures.
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That's... horrifying
and also this
Reading this story, my first thought is that this is someone you absolutely never want to spend time with, period
If that's the most popular guy in class then something has clearly gone horribly horribly wrong somewhere.
I don't know what these events were about, but if I were that professor that would be the point where I said "okay, we're going without you" and left.
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Pinkie Pie is "a nightmare with scheduling," according to Twilight. Applejack always gets things done on time, of course. Fluttershy wants to be on time, but Angel never lets her. But I suspect Rarity is quite flexible about being, and permitting others to be fashionably late.
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I can totally see Fluttershy being consistently late to stuff. She wouldn't want to make her friends wait for her, but with so many critters who can make demands on her time I'm sure she could easily be distracted past to lateness.
I've heard this referred to as 'Colored People Time:' it starts late, goes long and half the people don't show up on time.
They are lucky that they were not dealing with my father. His response to things like that was to say "I'll meet you there" and leave .
Firm believer in Negative Reinforcement, my father.