::: sigh :::
Let us suppose for the moment that your 4% figure is carved in stone and cast in concrete. The appropriate response to that figure as numerous posters have indicated, is “So what?”.
Both of my kids are ADD. My daughter would never get anywhere on time if an adult did not wind her up and put her on the appropriate form of transportation. That is great for your hypothesis. On the other hand, my son will either sit in front of a game or movie until it is too late for him to arrive on time or he will leave the house (or ask for a ride) in a time that will get him to his destination as much as 40 minutes early. Now given that some sufferes of ADD will be chronically late and some sufferers of ADD will arrive chronically early and some sufferers of ADD will arrive either late or early and some sufferers of ADD will (through an heroic exertion of effort) arrive on time nearly all the time, your “4%” is meaningless, because we do not know what percent of that four percent actually fall into one of four possible separate categories, (nor do we, with only the raw 4% figure that only applies to ADD) know how many persons are chronically late for some reason other than ADD, such as passive aggression, OCD, contempt for society or their friends, narcissism, Temporal Confusion Syndrome, or a host of other possible causes.
The reason that no one is interested in your “4% ADD” figure is that it is, at best, a partial explanation of a phenomenon that cannot be explained by only a single cause.
Now, at the beginning of this thread, I tended to be sympathetic to discussions of the difficulty of tracking time. I suffer cases of this, myself. There are activities in which I can tell, nearly to the minute how long I have been engaged. There are activities for which I can never gauge how long I have been participating. I am also a person who has trouble showing up at the exact moment that I am expected. (“Have trouble” however, does not translate to “does not” and “late” is more likely to mean a minute or so, not 20 minutes.) I have had several jobs (as a contract programmer) where my attendance was not required at 8:00 sharp and I would use my non-employee status to roll in at 8:30 or later–as long as there was not a meeting scheduled at 8:00, for which I would be on time. On the other hand, at five o’clock as the “real” staff filed out the door, I would generally continue working for one or two hours (meaning that the staff was able to eat dinner while I covered their emergency maintenance calls, making my later morning arrival more acceptable to them). When I have worked retail, I have had to be on time and, despite the fact that it took extra effort to achieve, I was on time.
Early claims by some posters that made absolute declarations that no one should be late or that people who were late were just being self-indulgent, therefore, tended to rub me the wrong way. However, as this trainwreck has progressed, despite the shrill tones on both sides, it is pretty clear that all but the most virulent of the promptness proponents are willing to allow for some adjustment to a person’s schedule as long as the person who has trouble with time does not impose on others, particularly chronically.
As long as you continue to harp on the fact that some tiny number of persons suffer a particular problem as though that excuses all similar behavior, even when your own references are inadequate to justify all such rude behavior and despite the fact that some persons suffering from the condition to which you seem to ascribe all the problems have posted in this thread noting that they have found ways to overcome thir disability, then you are going to both fail to make whatever point you believe you are making as well as continue to irritate both the extreme and the moderate opponents you face.
Your more recent point that it is the problem of people who have been delayed by the tardy because they should be able to not let such things bother them will do you no good. They can simply turn that around and say that the tardy person has no reason to feel ostracized when they stop getting invitations or upset for being fired when they fail to arrive at their job on time and no reason to be upset if a prompt person yells at them. After all, even if they cannot control their tardy behavior, surely they can control their personal reactions to the responses it brings.
