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Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

This vastly depends on culture and context.

We consider it impolite, if you show up for an invitation at someone’s home before the time you were invited for. Many would say it is even impolite to show up less then 5 minutes late, and consider being 10-15 minutes late the best, and up to 30-45 minutes acceptable.

For a business appointment or doctor's appointment, where there is an assistant that opens the door and a waiting area, it's expected to be early, so that you are already in front of the correct room when the appointment starts.

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I have a funny anecdote.

I don't know if it's a Korean thing or my mom-specific thing but she had very strong opinion about being early. For her 15 minutes early == on time. To reinforce this notion, she would set the house clocks later by some random undetermined minutes. The clocks in her home would all differ slightly so you could never tell what time it actually was unless you looked at your phone but you'd know you're little bit early to things for sure. Good times.

She didn't by chance serve in the military or a civil auxiliary branch, did she?

"Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable" was drilled into me while doing Civil Air Patrol back in secondary school (high school) and I habitually set all my clocks 5 minutes ahead, still, to this day.

She did not, but I would not be surprised if she picked it up for my granddad (he was in the UDU - precursor to the now ROK UDT/Flotilla).

I remember a discussion of why it was acceptable and even expected to be late at parties, but for work events, you had to be on time or better yet early, and the general consensus was "when you're doing work, you need to be precise, but when you're doing leisure, it's good to have time to relax while waiting for guests, and for guests not to stress getting there at a precise moment!"

I strive to be on time for work things, but don't mind being a little late to parties -- and this drives me and my my wife nuts, because my wife wants to be on time for parties.

It’s an aphorism

The other person already said that.

But for anyone living in an area where it's mostly wrong, it's not an aphorism for them.

You shouldn't nitpick an aphorism. But if it's wrong a sufficiently large amount of the time, rejecting it is fine.

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