Deadline Smedline

Deadline Smedline

I think deadlines are a fiction. I have never met a deadline I couldn’t extend. You may think that impervious deadline is set in stone; I know different. Just when you are sure the line has been drawn in the sand, watch that deadline move.

Applying for admission to get a master’s degree is one of my favorite examples. I had decided to get my master’s degree a little late, and after making sure all of my ducks were in a row, I went to register. Some people might do this in another order; get accepted into a program and then see if everything else would work out. Someday the way I view deadlines is going to backfire on me, but this was not the day.

I talked with the registration people about their degree programs, and indicated one I was especially interested in beginning. The woman behind the desk gave me the standard apoplectic stare usually associated with “deadlines”. She informed me I was seriously past the admission deadline, which was months before. I calmly took out my checkbook and asked her, “How much is the late fee?” She calmed down and told me it was ninety dollars.

Ninety dollars later, I was in the program and didn’t even bat an eye. Sometimes paying a late fee prevents serious complications if others things don’t go the way you want. What if I wasn’t approved for a sabbatical to start my masters? I would have been out the admission fee anyway.

This is not a technique for the faint of heart. I understand bus drivers and train engineers have a schedule to keep, but if they miss an appointed deadline for arriving at a certain place, they have to adjust and try to make up time later in the trip. Can this kind of philosophy succeed in today’s world?

I think one of my inspirations for not sweating deadlines comes from the 1980’s movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy”. This convoluted tale about a Coke bottle in an African desert has an interesting statement about aboriginal life in the Kalahari. The narrator says something like this. “In the Kalahari, there is no Monday, or Tuesday, or any other day for that matter. There are no clocks to regulate what happens when on any particular day.” I like that attitude.

All these days, hours and minutes we have created are really just a way to mark time and be able to meet together at pre-arranged times. I’m not sure how the modern world would work without clocks, but remember, somewhere one day someone said, “This is the correct time, this is the day of the week, and this is the number we will use for our years.”

Unconvinced? Go to any encyclopedia and look up Jesus Christ. Even Wikipedia lists his birth year as 4 B.C. Even if you use the phrase Before the Common Era instead of B.C., tell me what is supposed to be the start of the common era? The birth of Christ. B.C. means before Christ, but for political correctness, you can also say before the common era. For those who don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, this is another was to refer to the Gregorian calendar without invoking the name of Christ. But that’s not the point here. Did you hear the date given for his birth? Four B.C., or four B.C.E for everyone else.

If we are off four years for the birth of Christ, why are we worrying about deadlines? Here’s another reason I’m not too worried about deadlines. I can always tell people I am running my life on the Julian calendar and not the Gregorian. Because the Julian calendar didn’t use leap days, when most of the western world switched to the Gregorian calendar, we had to skip ten days. Seriously. On Thursday, October 4th in 1582, people went to bed and woke up the next day, which was Friday, October 15th. They skipped 10 days overnight to correct the calendar.

I feel sorry for the people who had birthdays on October 5th through 14th in 1582. Did they get to celebrate their birthdays, or were they just lumped into the 15th? Think about people who are born on February 29th; they only get to celebrate their real birthday every four years.

So a deadline is not as solid as you may think. I’m glad I wasn’t alive in 1582. What if the tax man had given you an October 15th deadline, and you went to sleep on the 4th thinking you had ten more days to find the money? The next morning, you wake up and see you are in deep trouble.

This is when you would take out your bag of gold and ask, “How much is the late fee?”

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