Value for time

I was locked in my new flat whole of my weekend just because I had to get some work done from various workers. Since last Tue/Wed I was co-ordinating with all the supervisors or contact points to get the work done on Saturday. Everyone agreed to be on time and be there on Saturday. And it turns out that I am calling up each of them from 11:30 AM only to find out that the required person is either not reachable, or busy with some other work or a falst promise - he'll be there in few minutes.

Finally I got hold of one worker who was supposed to change the skirting tiles in my hall. When the seapage was stealing my sleep, we had removed the POP from lower part of the walls and that had damaged the skirting tiles. So, now to keep the good look intact, I was getting the replaced. This worker starts with the work and breaks adjacent tile as well. Not just that, he damaged around 1 inch piece of the color as well. Finally I had to stop him from doing more damage and asked him to replace only those tiles and nothing more. The fellow disappeared. I assumed he has gone down to bring mortar and other things only to realize after 1.5 hours that he has not returned. So I called up his supervisor and reached a switched off mobile. Irritatingly I 'escalated' to the next level and found that he is busy with some other customer. So finally I went down 4 floors, found that engineer in person, took him back to my flat, located the worker and finally I got it done.

In software industry we give highest preference to the committed dates and time. No matter what, we do anything and everything to meet the deadline. Then why can't I get same kind of service from others as well? I would have understood, if it would have been the behavior only from uneducated people. But my general experience is that it's common across the cross-section of the society. Only few of them really care for the time, others just waste it.

"Time is the scarcest resource on the earth, once passed, you can't get it back"

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