Time is money, I have time to spear, I can't waste time, I've got no time for this, and many other are the quotes we all hear regarding time, but is time the same for every culture? which culture does values time more? This questions can be analyzed by comparing a culture with another culture. I was able to live no The States for over a year and I did notice something really special about time, something I was not able to see in Panama.
Panamanians have a certain sense of time which actually differs too much from the American perspective of time. Here is there is a meeting with someone at 3:00pm be sure that the meeting will not start before 3:15pm, this is if you are lucky and everyone decides to show "on time". While I was in America I was able to notice that meetings do take place at the exact time the other person proposed it to begin on the first place.
Sometimes here in Panama if you make an appointment with someone at the University, there are two ways this meeting could develop. One is that the person before you actually got there on time and you will also get there on time and the meeting will start and end at the time was scheduled for. The other way is that the person before you decides to be there 20 minutes late and by doing this, even if you are there on time, you will not be able to have the meeting at the time it was scheduled for. When I was on the states, this was not an option, once I got late to a meeting with my sports massagist, and she was so upset that I was there late for 10 minutes that she told me to come back tomorrow, because she has a schedule and she will not be able to follow it if she attends me at this time, that I was not her only apointment that day. This taught me the perspective of time, which Americans have over the one I had as a Colombian on a Panamanian culture.