Culture School is in session! In this series, we take an aspect of intercultural theory and apply to daily life. Basically, our goal is to expose those cultural moonwalking bears. And because this blog is about culture and education, we consider each topic in the context of the classroom.
photo by maryatexitzero
A few months ago, my husband (who is American) and I (a Romanian) went to a McDonald’s drive-thru. If you’ve never experienced a McDonald’s drive-thru in the U.S., here is a brief description of how you order, pay, and pick up your food:
You first drive to a pretty large and very colorful menu screen, which is conveniently placed in the parking lot of the restaurant. It is in front of this screen that you talk to an employee via a microphone and order your food.
Then you drive to a small window, where you pay for your food.
And then you drive to a second small window, where a McDonald’s employee hands you your food.
photo by humain
Ok, so back to my story.
After paying, we drove to that second window to pick up our food. As the McDonald’s employee handed us our food, she said I am sorry for the delay.
My husband said no worries. Then, we drove away.
I started thinking delay? What delay?
So I turned to my husband and asked him if he thought our food was late. He said that yes, it was a bit late.
I was dumbfounded, to say the least. Let me explain why.
The entire process, from the moment we pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot to the moment we drove away, lasted about 3 minutes (this is an estimate that my American husband would agree with).
We waited for no more than 1 minute at the second window before we got our food. To me, that’s not late! Definitely not late enough to warrent an apology.
But the perspective of the two Americans I interacted with at the moment I was handed my food (my husband and the McDonald’s employee) was that having to wait 1 minute at the drive-thru window was too long. Because our food wasn’t delivered immediately, it was late.
Why is it that my perception of time was so radically different from my husband’s?
Could it have anything to do with culture?
YES! I am absolutely convinced of it.
To quote Edward T. Hall, who is considered by many to be the founder of intercultural communication, time talks. Sometimes louder than words.
Cultures can perceive time in very different ways. (Individuals can too, but right now we’re talking about culture in a big-picture sense, about cultural patterns based on research that of course don’t apply to every single person in a culture, but do influence a great many people, practices,and perspectives.) And these differences are fascitnating to explore.
Today we begin a series of Go to Culture School posts on the various perceptions of time around the world. Of course, we will also take a close look at how these different cultural perceptions of time affect education around the world.
But before we delve deeper into to topic of time, we’d like to know: have you ever had an experience when you had a completely different understanding of time than somebody else? Leave a comment and tell us about it!
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This is not a matter of perception of time but rather the response of the perception–two different stories.
Hi Ed, thank you for your comment. In reading it, I started wondering: doesn’t the response to a perception depend on the nature of the perception? In other words, don’t we need to look at the perception first, before we respond to it?
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