The unimportance of being early

There are two types of people – those who insist on arriving early, and those who don’t.

My wife is one of the former. For some reason I’ve yet to fathom, she likes to arrive at airports three hours before flight time and, for movies, concerts and appointments, at least an hour early.

I, on the other hand, am one of those people who prefers to arrive at the last possible minute.

It all goes back to the early days of running my own advertising agency when, in order to impress clients with my responsiveness, I would start work on an assignment the moment I hung up the phone. As often as not, once work on the project was well underway, the client would call with a change of direction, which meant the work had to be revised or scrapped, or would cancel the assignment altogether. Clients, I quickly discovered, tended to sit on invoices for work they authorized but were unable to use because they didn't want their bosses to find out they had wasted money by hot-potatoing assignments to the agency just to get them off their desks. I often wound up having to remind clients, repeatedly, to pay bills for revised or canceled work and half the time they would try to negotiate me down to protect their own asses.

So, for most of my career, I started work at the last possible minute. I found that by doing so, a.) I was less likely to have to re-do it and b.) I produced my best work under deadline pressure. It drove my employees, who for some reason liked to go home around 5 p.m or so, crazy, but that’s the way I ran my business, even though I often wound up working nights, weekends and holidays including one Christmas spent in a recording studio.

  

In all that time my agency missed exactly one deadline. I was able to weasel my way out of that by claiming the client’s layouts were on a FedEx flight that had conveniently crashed overnight. By the time the layouts arrived at the client’s office one day late, the project had been cancelled and it took me 90 days to collect payment.

The net net is that, in business, I learned it’s a waste of time to be early for anything, a lesson I still apply to my personal life.  Plus, I enjoy seeing my wife hyperventilate.

Now that I’m retired, I occasionally give in to her unreasonable demands for early arrival just so I won’t have to listen to her complaints. Friday night, for instance, we went to a concert at a venue 15 miles from our house. She insisted we leave an hour and a half early, claiming we might get caught in traffic or have trouble finding a parking spot. We arrived 73 minutes early, time I could have used to ride my bike, go to the gym or binge-watch two episodes of Veep on HBO-To-Go. Instead, we wasted that valuable time in a nearby bar, which is why I don’t remember much about the concert.

Nowadays, if my wife is flying somewhere on her own, I drop her off at the airport, as she demands, three hours early. What she does there I can’t imagine. I am told that airports have restaurants where one can buy snacks and stores that sell reading materials, but I wouldn’t know since I’ve never walked down a concourse, I’ve always ran.

As I like to remind her, of the hundreds of flights we've taken together over the years, we've never once missed a plane. I'll admit that, returning home from a business trip years ago, I did have to beg a TWA agent, who had already rolled back the jet bridge when I got to the gate, to reattach it so I could board.

It cost me $50, which I palmed off to the agent discretely so none of the passengers who had irrationally arrived early for the next flight scheduled to depart from that gate could see it but, by God, he agreed.