My brother and his wife are generally about 2 hours late to any family function. Last year, my brother’s wife showed up 15 minutes late with their kids to our mother’s funeral. I’m sorry, I don’t care what your issues are, get in the damned car when you’re supposed to and be at the church for your mother-in-law’s funeral! The kids are old enough to dress themselves. Just get everybody moving. Plan to be there 30 minutes ahead if you have to.
Later last year, for Christmas dinner, my sister invited my brother and his family. He asked when dinner was being served and she said 4:00. She heard him say to his wife “Dinner’s at four, We should leave our house at 5:00.” For an hour drive! My sister said, “No, you need to be here at 4:00 if you want to spend Christmas with us.”
They are both so lackadaisical about time, even though they know it drives everyone crazy. I honestly don’t care what the motivation behind it is, it’s inconsiderate and rude.
Chronically late person here. It’s got nothing to do with rebellion, and everything to do with a cluttered life and poor organization skills. I care a lot about my friends, in fact I often suspect I care about them too much for my own good. But in any case…
One factor is stupid, but all too common : no watching the clock. Whether I’m working, or playing, or reading, I’m going to be doing that with my entire brain. There won’t be a little part going “watch the clock, you must be out by 8”. By now, my friends have taken the habit of calling me or dropping an SMS an hour before the rendez vous, just to make sure I’m awake and aware of what time it is.
The second factor is a bit more asinine : if you’re already late, why hurry ? They’re my friends, they know I’m not the most punctual guy, and it’s already too late to be on time. They’ll forgive me, they’re used to me. I’ll just warn them to start without me.
Finally, optimism re. transportation. For some reason, I’m convinced I can be anywhere in town within 30 minutes, which is absolutely correct… assuming the 30 minutes start out at the subway station. Add the time to get there from home, get dressed and so forth, and the 30 minutes quickly turn into 45. And I never manage to quite correct that certitude that “I’ll be there in 30 minutes”. Ironically, it’s even worse for trips that are shorter than 30 minutes’ worth, because then I figure “heh, it’s close, I can take my time”.
This would mean instant un-invite and banning from all future family or other functions with me. That’s not lack of planning or getting distracted, that’s an obvious “I don’t care enough about you to be on time.”
I used to be chronically early, and now I’m down to within a range of a few minutes early or a few minutes late. The CLs drive me absolutely nuts! I think there are a number of causes.
My brother is chronically late. It’s because he doesn’t want to spend as much time with the rest of the family as the others do. My sister is chronically late, it’s because she cannot tell time. My girlfriend is chronically late because she is a narcissist. My cousin was chronically late (and now permanently late) because she was passive aggressive. The girlfriend’s family women all play a game of who can be latest and make the rest of the bunch wait on them.
My revenge is to mock them all mercilessly for this criminal behavior and in the case of going into a show, I just go in. If it’s dinner, I wait a bit, then I eat.
That’s just a flat-out statement they don’t want to have dinner with you. Which is, of course, their right, but is also something very hurtful to tell a sibling at Christmas.
A good friend of mine grew up in rural Africa, so his sense of timing is different to mine.
Where he lived there was no point being “on time” for the 2pm bus, because 2pm meant “sometime that day”, and even when it arrived it would generally hang around for a couple of hours waiting for people to trek in from distances to catch it.
Likewise the town cinema would aim to start some time in the evening, but depending on whether the electricity was on this could be any time from 7pm to 11pm.
He brought that experience back to the UK and it’s been hard to shake.
Still, he was Best Man at my wedding and we arrived on time so all good.
Or depending on their reaction, they may be stirring up drama intentionally so that the get-togethers are All About Them. Hold dinner for them and they’re the stars as they walk in, finally allowing the holiday to proceed. Don’t hold dinner and they can get in a snit over how “rude” others are.
I’ve encountered that attitude a few times, it pisses me off to no end. I can’t imagine having that little respect for anyone that I’d actually speak to. I’m not the most social, nor nicest guy, but being deliberately late to a family meal? I… there aren’t words.
I do use a smart phone, and have for years. I’d never remember what days my appointments are on, let alone what time. What’s really annoying is that I can tell you the date and time I met my wife, our anniversairy, the birthdates of all my close family and friends off the top off my head; I couldn’t tell you if they’re soon or not, though.
I work fine in either highly structured or highly unstructured environments. It’s the middle ground where I have the most problems, annoyingly most social situations are in that middle ground. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to make a career out of being the best person to call at 2am when the world is coming apart at the seams, which seems to make up for the fact that there’s a two hour range of when I’ll get into the office.
I’ve missed a few, some that I paid for, some work related, all vastly embarassing. I hate being late. Fortunately my wife doesn’t travel as much as I used to, and is always anxious about getting to the airport on time, so I rely on her (honestly, without her I’d never be anywhere on time unless it was an extremely interesting and high pressure event).
This just means that, for whatever reason, they are planning to be two hours late.
They know what time dinner is. They don’t want to be there for it. It would be rude to try to force them to eat when they don’t want. Ergo, no problem. Dinner goes on as scheduled.
I agree 100%–probably the first time you and I have agreed I don’t understand some of the attitudes in this thread. I personally don’t care why someone is habitually late, why should I? If I plan dinner at 6, that is when we eat. I am not going to inconvenience my family or my other friends for “you-the late one”. If you arrive a few times late and there is no dinner there, you either adjust or you don’t. What are you going to do? Complain that we didn’t hold dinner until you got there? Honestly? I suppose you can try it and see how far you would get with me, but I wouldn’t suggest that as a good strategy of getting invited to dinner in the future.
So you know what time dinner is, or the show is, or whatever. You can choose to be there, or be late, doesn’t matter to me. Most of our friends are on-time people, but we have a few couples who aren’t. But they also know we start at the time we say we will, so they accept that we will be eating dinner if they are late. One couple adjusted, the other didn’t, and they typically come about 45 minutes late and that is fine as they have only inconvenienced themselves. I like them very much as friends, I am just not going to hold my dinner/other guests as hostage to their lateness. They take this in stride as well so it all is good. No reason for me to question their motives as I truly don’t care.
I’m not chronically late, though I’m worse than I used to be. I make it to work (even though no one cares when I show up), appointments, movies, and formal events with no problems at all.
However, I am bad about being late for parties and trips. I think it’s because I have a lot of anxiety about both, so I stall. For parties, I don’t want to arrive early (because I hate it when I’m working on the last details for a party and someone shows up early and expects me to entertain them), but I also am kind of nervous about parties (no idea why!), so I end up leaving later than I’d like. This results in me being late, but never more than half an hour. I’m working on it.
For trips, I never leave on time unless I have to catch a flight or something. I get anxious about forgetting things, so I overpack, then take things out, then worry about it, then eventually leave. This one’s not usually a big deal, but I really need to fix the party one.
It’s really not narcissism, at least not on purpose.
Why on earth would you need six different alarms? What would be wrong with a single alarm (on your wrist, so no one but you needs to hear it) that you set to remind you of your next daily deadline? The device that would do this would cost around $10 and take about 10 minutes to learn.
This “I have no sense of time” pleading puzzles me. Very few people are naturally gifted in this skill - that’s why clocks and alarms were invented. Nowadays they are amazingly cheap and easy to use. Why not use them?
I’m quite punctual, but I have at least one analogous skill deficiency: I have trouble remembering that I’ve put a pot on the stove. Long ago, after several instances of burning soup to a cinder and even melting an aluminum pot, the penny finally dropped: get a kitchen timer! It cost around $3. I’ve formed the habit of using this whenever I cook something, which has solved the problem.
For another analogy, consider the person with a poor sense of direction. One way of dealing with this would be to resign yourself permanently to driving aimlessly around town, hoping to stumble across your destination. Another would be to make use of such tools as maps and GPS navigation devices. Which is the better solution?
I have studied CL for over 20 years, in my wife and my children. So thank you, Manda JO, that really does describe one of the issues. I’ve seen this kind of thing a million times. No matter where we are going my wife will estimate the time involved to be the absolute theoretical minimum. Maybe she doesn’t like to wait (she doesn’t) and maybe she puts things off (she does) but the lateness is, I believe, more of a miscalculation than any kind of aggressive behavior. I believe CL is a fundamental difference in the way we judge time. Or maybe it’s a complete lack of empathy, which is what I begin to believe when I’ve been standing in the hot son for a half hour because my wife hasn’t arrived to pick me up at the time we agreed on.
Both my oldest son and my wife are CLers. When they are together their lateness gets worse. I think CLers pick up cues from others about when it is time to do things so that, for example, my wife may not even start dressing until she sees me dressing. When the wife and son are together they both wait for those cues that never come from each other. They seem to be thinking, “no need for me to start since nobody else has”. Once I get over the anger are being so late it can be amusing to watch. Neither wants to be the first one to be ready to go so they will go in and out of the house multiple times, like trying to get the late word in an argument, until finally one or the other can’t think of any reason to go back.
Obviously I do. (see comments above about smart phones). An alarm on my wrist would get destroyed shortly after it distracted me from something important that occured outside of expectations, or would simply become background noise. The joy of ADHD is that someone walking between the cubes two rows over is as distracting as someone talking normally in my cube (either not at all, or completely, with next to no middle ground). Alarms are the same way; some days I notice them, some days I’ve shut them off without ever having become aware of them, and more days than I’ll ever be happy with I don’t even notice them going off in the first place.
I have a very good sense of time, for things like that. I don’t use timers for anything on the stove top, I can tell you how long it will take to get through the current level of traffic, and my task estimates for projects at work are within 10% of the actual time. But that’s after the meds kick in. Before then, or after they wear off, I’m always wrong about time. Not consistently wrong, of course, that’d be easy to deal with.
I don’t miss meetings (or hold them up waiting for me), but the time I’ve gotten into the office this week has varied from 8:15 to 9:45, and that’s just three days. Then again, with a half hour variation in my commute time being a factor of life, it’s not that bad.
It doesn’t work that way. The ADHD component that makes people late isn’t the distractibility, it’s the hyper focus. When I’m deep into some problem, or book, or piece of art, the rest of the world doesn’t exist. It’s very, very easy for me to get that deeply into things; the more bored I am, the harder it is to not lose myself in the first semi-interesting thing to cross my eyes. The meds give me great deal more control over this, but only when they’re actually in my system (biographical note, I’m midthirties, midcareer technical professional, and I only started the meds a couple of years ago. I’ve paid a great deal of attention to how I see the world when they’re in my system and how I see it when they’re not. I have no idea how my wife put up with me for the decade before I started them).
I’ve never missed a flight or train due to lateness, even when I was at my worst. Since I knew I was chronically late (and was working desperately to correct it), I always overcompensated and got to the airport at least an hour to an hour and a half early. Both my husband and I still do.
I don’t understand some of the attitudes in this thread. I personally don’t care why someone is habitually late, why should I? If I plan dinner at 6, that is when we eat. I am not going to inconvenience my family or my other friends for “you-the late one”. If you arrive a few times late and there is no dinner there, you either adjust or you don’t. What are you going to do? Complain that we didn’t hold dinner until you got there? Honestly? I suppose you can try it and see how far you would get with me, but I wouldn’t suggest that as a good strategy of getting invited to dinner in the future.