This Petty Pace

I am pathologically punctual. If I'm invited to a dinner party at, say, seven o'clock, I'll be there at the dot of seven. Sometimes I can't help it. I try to be a little late and I still end up arriving a precisely the appointed time. Other times I'll arrive ten or fifteen minutes early and have to walk around the block a few times. Here's what ticks me off (pun intended), the hosts are never ready when I get there because they've assumed everyone will be fashionably late, so I end up feeling like a clumsy intruder as they rush around trying to get things ready. Why the heck do we even bother with clocks and watches, if people seem to pay so little attention to them? When I drove cross country, just me and my two dogs, I crawled into my tent to sleep when the sun went down and was on the road when it came up. I ignored the time, I kept mileage.