I don’t really understand this. You know how long it takes to get ready and leave your house, right? So where is this ‘empty’ time?
My Wife and I are always on time. It really isn’t that hard to do. I don’t think, that in my 48 years, I have ever been late for any scheduled event. Never. A little bit of planning can make your life so much easier. And, you will be considered a considerate person by those that you don’t keep waiting.
It really makes things much simpler and calmer when you know the time that you need to leave. You just do it. No rushing around at the last minute.
People that run late are a pet peeve of mine. I really don’t get it.
Over the past few years (possibly due to different medication) I’ve gotten better. I now plan things leaving an hour or two of time for delays in preparation, transportation etc.
Still, whenever I have jury duty I am petrified I will be a few hours late and get fined for contempt.
In many cases, if I have to leave in the morning to get somewhere on time, I get so worried I cannot sleep at all the night before.
These threads usually devolve into a series of accusations about the fundamental character of the chronically late (CL). They think their time is more valuable than yours, they’re narcissists, they’re self-centered, it’s an act of aggression (???), etc. (I bet **DocCathode **is a veteran of these threads.)
I don’t think any of that is true. I have a mother and a very close friend who are CL, and aside from that they’re both very considerate, giving, and even self-sacrificing. By inclination, I would be a mild CL-case myself, except I have an extreme aversion to rocking the boat, so I’m constantly rushing out the door and spending $15 on a cab instead of $2 on the subway so I can get there just barely on time. It’s just some weird mental block, closely tied in most cases to general procrastination, I think.
ETA: It’s annoying to deal with, of course, but to making sweeping character judgements based on this one foible seems like indulgence.
So do you generally end up being early when you’re making that extra effort to be on time? Because that would help my ‘some people just don’t have a sense of time like the rest of us’ theory.
Yes, actually. When I attended a baptism this spring, I ended up getting to the train station an hour early. My friends were worried when they found out I had waited an hour in the station, as two people had been murdered there.
On another occasion, I called from a train station to say I’d be late only to be told I was actually on time.
Lets say I complete Task 1 with 40 minutes to spare before I have to start getting ready. I will routinely try to slip in Task 2 (which may take 60 minutes) when I know I don’t have time. Asking me to sit still unoccupied for 40 minutes is like asking a rose to stop being a rose. Hey, I didn’t say it was logical, I’m just trying to explain how my brain works. Like I said earlier, it’s truly a double standard because I COULD be 40 minutes early to the function but I hate to waste time waiting.
That is totally me. I am so anxious about getting up on time that I can’t sleep the night before.
My SIL’s pulled that exact crap. They decided to take a sightseeing trip the day of our wedding. Both they and their kids were in the wedding. They didn’t make it back anywhere near on time because they were simply fucking off. They arrived 5 minutes before the scheduled start and they still had to get themselves and their kids dressed. The service had to be delayed for 20 minutes because of them. Thanks you irresponsible narcissistic cunts. You just wasted the time of 150 people because you can’t read a clock or do 1st grade math. I have no sympathy for that type of behavior and I do believe it is a real mental illness or at least a mental developmental disorder in many cases.
There is an old thread from a former poster that tries to explain this type of thinking and it sounds bizarre. I will try to find it. Many of these people claim that they have no sense of time. The nail in the coffin for that type of reasoning is that they should be arriving very early as well very late if that were the case which obviously isn’t true. There is something else going on.
Listen up you motherfuckers. I am withholding names here for two reasons. One, I’m not pitting you. I’d like to, quite frankly, I really would, because let me tell you how much I hate being called a sociopath and arrogant and rude and so on by people I respect in an opinion forum (hell, I wouldn’t like being called these things anywhere but IMHO is definitely higher on that list than this forum). But I’m not. You walk into this thread and claim an opinion, that’s your call: you’ve got my vitrol. I’m not dragging you in, calling you out, or any other sort of ridiculous behavior. Two, some of the quotes above are from an old thread, and perhaps you’ve become a little nicer of person in this time. I don’t want to pin anyone to something they said a while ago.
Listen up you motherfuckers. I realize some people might have issues with being late. Considerate, thoughtful, intelligent, respectable people also realize that their time is no more important than mine, and we seek accord on that. You want facts? I’ve got a fact: expecting me to make nitpicky fucking schedules to see you would be just as annoying as me expecting you to wait on my lateness. Some of you cruel fucks would consider this minor fucking hurdle to seeing each other as a mountain of epic proportions. Tell your friends how much you love them. Next friend you see, you tell them, “I love you, you’re a great friend and all, but I tell ya what, if you ever stop being punctual, out the door with you you arrogant bastard.” FUCKING SAY IT TO EVERYONE. Your husbands and wives, you children, your friends… go on. Because that’s what it means to be your friend. And since having fucking precise contracts is so god damned important, make your fucking intentions clear now. Don’t just tell them how you feel, tell them everything you expect from them, tell them how you expect them to adopt your standards of politeness and explain that if they don’t adopt your standards they will “obviously” be “rude” and “arrogant” and “selfish”. Go ahead. Because that’s what you mean, isn’t it? That’s what you want in people.
Listen up you motherfuckers. You’ve got a double standard here. I don’t know what fucking incredibly asinine generalization you made to reach it, or how many assholes you had to come across to form it, and frankly I don’t much want to know. Because you’re wrong.
Yes, I remember very well the hugely involved threads in which CL’ers consistently tried to argue (or so it seemed to me) that :
(1) they honestly can’t help it; it takes an act of God and a gigantic mental effort that is often beyond their capability to plan and allocate the correct amount of preparation/travel time required to arrive on time; OR
(B) being on time is way overrated anyway; can’t you just accept me [the CL’er] the way I am? What kind of a friend can’t overlook something so insignificant?
While I can sort of see where people are coming from arguing (B) (although I don’t agree with it), I have never ever had any sympathy for the (1) argument.
I have an acquaintance who runs her life chronically late and rushing places because she’s never on time. It’s a number of factors: Among other things, she’s clearly ADD; she absolutely can not say no to or put off anything her spouse asks her to do (she drops everything and does what’s requested this instant); and in her own mind, grossly oversimplifies/exaggerates on the brief side the amount of time something takes – this drives me crazy and I can hear it in her voice a mile away when it’s happening:
“I’ll be home pretty soon I just need to run to [town 30 miles away]-real-quick” (this translates to at least a ninety minute trip, but she doesn’t see it that way. It’s the “real quick” that gets me).
“Tell him I’ll call him back this afternoon, I just have to run over to X’s house real-quick and help X with his boat motor”.
“I’ll have to take the kids to the doctor today so I’ll do the [3 hour meeting preparation activities] tonight” (this translates to, it won’t get done and she’ll be doing it on the fly in the car because doing it tonight at home is impossible given what her home life obligations are like)
Now, I really like the person and consider her a friend. This CL-ness of hers doesn’t impact my life hardly at all, because I just simply make it a point to never rely on her to be on time for anything or make critical time-sensitive plans involving her. But goddamn I couldn’t live the way she does, in a state of constant crisis, largely by her own choosing.
I think in a way it can be, but it also may be the person simply doesn’t care
I used to run a call center and it employed a lot of $1.00 plus minimum wage jobs, and the attitude toward lateness was always, "Yeah OK,’ and if I said “Well the next time you’re late you’ll have to be let go,” the answer was always “Ok, so what there are a lot of jobs like these.”
Now that could be viewed as hostility or just a simple fact. I think it was more of a simple fact. They knew they if they lost a job it’d take them less than an hour to get another one.
I’ve known chronically late people and it seems to but others more than them. People will say “If you don’t show up will leave with out you.” So they do and then these people spend the whole evening mad, while the late person who got left, just finds other ways to amuse themselves for the evening.
I think often lateness is just a bad habit combined with not caring. I also think cell phones have a lot to do with it. People think they can simply call and get off with being late or blowing people off etc.
I’ve posted this before I think.
My (still) friend told me he would be here at 12:00 to go to lunch with me. He is buying (WOW).
When he arrives at 2:30, he goes completely off the deep end. Why can’t I go out to lunch with him especially since he is buying?? Well for one thing I have to pick up my kids in ten minutes, and unless your generosity extends to them, it’s a no-go. He is always late, tell him 1:00 he will not be there before 1:30, usually 2 hours is normal for him. At work, he is always late, but only to the extent that they allow him to get away with it.
So he spent two weeks being mad at me because he was over 2 hours late.
Nowadays he knows not to invite me anywhere, I simply say no, I can’t make it.
I was never much for inviting him in the first place myself, because I couldn’t count on him to be there on time.
If you told him you would give him $$ to be there on time, he would be late, and still expect $$.
I think it’s sometimes a subconscious act of passive-aggression, but it’s more typically a sub-conscious expression of priorities and how flexible they perceive the timing of something to be. For stuff that’s important to them or that they see as being a rigidly time-sensitive thing, they’re right on time, but for stuff that isn’t a priority for them or things that it doesn’t matter to them when it happens and they foresee no negative consequences for being late…well, you know.
One of my husband’s best friends from high school is the pinnacle of this sort of behavior. She and her husband are never late for work. To my knowledge they weren’t typically late for classes when they were in school. If we fly out of their city and they pick us up at the airport, they’re typically there by the time we get our bags. But if you try to go somewhere with them…you might as well accept they’ll be a bare minimum of an hour late. If they’ve agreed to go with you to something that starts at 8 and you’ve arranged to pick them up at 7:30, at 7:28 they will start taking showers and considering what to wear. I have a theory that they met because they were both supposed to come to a meeting but by the time either of them showed up, the thing was over and everyone else had left.
I just wish I could figure out what, exactly, it is that they perceive differently about taking us to and from the airport than going to a concert or to dinner with us, why they’re on time for the hassle they get nothing out of and late for the fun stuff.
If being late really was just accidental, by the law of averages, wouldn’t these late-comers be on time at least part of the time? My brother and his wife are NEVER on time for ANYTHING. How is this possible?
My husband’s whole family has no sense of time. In part its a “time isn’t important to me, I don’t know why its important to you.” In part its a “I need to fit in one more thing into my day before I can get over to your place” (sometimes that thing is a nap). Part of it is the lack of recognition that teleporters haven’t been invented yet (“we are leaving now…”). Part of it seems to be the thought that if you aren’t right there, you don’t exist, or aren’t doing anything important, and so waiting for them doesn’t have any impact. Drives me batty. They have gotten better because they do understand that time IS important to me.
IMHO it is about power. I had this person who commonly showed up late, actually every time. I used to hold up the group giving him the time to get with us. From what he said it appeared like he expected this as if we were there to serve him. After so many times I stopped waiting for him. After a couple of times of him getting there and we were gone it appears he learned that such behavior is not acceptable.
