Is there a 12-step group for punctuality addiction?

For some people, punctuality is a virtue; for me, it's a disease. Missing a deadline makes me physically ill--even if it's not my fault.

In all the years I worked as a journalist, I missed a deadline only once, when a job-related injury sent me to the emergency room for X-rays.

I dropped a book on my foot.

It was a big book, a bound volume containing an entire year's run of a weekly newspaper, and I dropped it from a pretty good height, which caused my foot to turn ugly colors and swell to elephantine proportions. A year later I still had problems tying my left shoe, and pain was a constant companion for months.

Fortunately, a trained Emergency Medical Technician was present when I dropped the book, and he provided immediate assistance. "You ought to get someone to look at that," he said.

Because of my unexpected visit to the emergency room, I missed the event I was supposed to be covering: a local boy's Eagle Scout ceremony. In small-town journalism, this counts as hot news. The next day, the Eagle Scout's usually perky mother called me at the office to curse me loudly and at great length. You can't tell a screaming mother "I dropped a book on my foot," so I apologized.

Okay: I'm hobbling around on a foot that looks like it belongs to the Elephant Man while this churchgoing mother curses me in terms that would make a longshoreman blush, and I'm the one apologizing? What's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong is my compulsive need to be punctual, a neurosis that has been keeping me awake all this week, ever since the deadline passed for the submission of a particular document.

Let the record show that I did my part. I turned in my share of the work on August 17, so the person responsible for doing the rest of the work and turning the document in by Sept. 30 has had five full weeks to do so. The stakes are pretty low, but that doesn't matter: the deadline was Tuesday and the document is not done, so I've been hobbling around under a heavy weight of guilt and catching maybe three hours of sleep each night, tossing and turning on the mattress and thinking dark thoughts in the wee hours.

My dilatory colleague looks cheerful and well rested. Every time I see him, he says something like, "Yeah, I guess I'd better get to work on that, ha ha!" Next time I find myself lying awake at 3 a.m., I'll call my colleague at home and share some of my dark thoughts--except he would probably just curse me loudly in terms that would make a longshoreman blush, and then I would end up apologizing.

Times like these I envy the irresponsible.