Your time is money

Published 12:56 pm Wednesday, July 30, 2025

By TJ Ray

Columnist

Now as none of my college degrees deal with fiscal affairs, I have little idea of what that means.  My sense of it is that the more we use time or the faster we get things done, the more money we generate.  If UPS and FedEx can move packages faster, they have more clock time to move more parcels.  More parcels, more profit.  At least that’s what I think is meant.

Now we’ve come to a hole in the dike:  doing some things faster costs more money.  Of course, the increased cost of running big brown trucks or Kroger semis is passed along to the public, thereby creating the continued profit to the corporations while at the same time causing greater concern of the average family who can’t increase their income at the same rate that prices are raised.  For John Q. Public the hole in the dike grows bigger while his thumb remains the same size.

My old pal Lester Pithfroggle was opining about our mess just the other day over a cup of McDonald’s Deluxe coffee.  His idea is that “Time is money” might be better understood if it were replaced by “Time is time.”  Sounded as though Lester had been at his jug too early in the day, but here’s the gist (I think) of what he said.

Consider time to be more important than anything else in the world.  Folks can talk about depleted petroleum reserves and vanishing forests and atmosphere fouling all they want to, and that’s what gets most of the headlines.  But far more important is that time is disappearing also, and no scientist in any laboratory of Earth has begun to figure out a replacement for it.  He ended his disquisition by saying, “What’s the hurry?”

When semis run slower, they run more efficiently.  When giant airplanes don’t fly until they have full loads, less fuel is burned.  When law enforcement officers obey the speed limit when not chasing bad guys, their squad cars last longer and cost less in gas bills to the public.  

Lester once got me to put forward his solution to much of the problem.  Way back in ’06, he got me to write a piece about the need for a 20-horsepower car.  His list of benefits from such a revolutionary gadget was impressive.  Of course, no one listened to him.  And now many of our streets are clogged with huge SUVs and other obscenities, often occupied by one individual, but running around like the proverbial bat out of hell.

The Pithfroggle Plan (awaiting more coffee before completion and legislation) will require much of what Lester suggested back in December 2006:  lower speed limits obeyed by everyone, which should result in fewer and less traumatic accidents which will yield fewer wrecked bodies and decimated families and will generate less pollution to aid in saving our environment.  And perhaps it will remind us that we’re all in this together, hurrying around to spend time doing things that might well be left undone.

One crucial piece of the PP (Pithfroggle Plan) is that any person complaining about the environment or rising fuel costs will be required to sign a blood oath never to exceed the speed limit and will never purchase a vehicle that does not have the lowest horsepower on the market.  Fines for violating this oath will be triple that for other folks. 

In other words, the complainers will have to practice what they preach.  One can only wonder what Ralph Nader drives.

Your needless speeding and gasoline waste affect my life, my time.  Almost 400 years ago an English writer said this better than Lester or I might do:  “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”  His meditation ends on a somber note.  

In the years through and following the Middle Ages, deaths from famine and plague were so common that funeral bells accompanying corpses to the grave were commonplace.  

Absent newspapers and television and radio, it was often unknown whose time had run out.  The writer ended by giving this bit of advice:

“Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

All the money in the world, all the titles and power people have, and all the King’s men cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again—when his time is up.