Actually my concern more recently in the thread (in my head if not also in writing) has been with the question of what attitude to have towards those who are often late, whatever you think about the psychological underpinnings of their lateness.
There have been two notable people in my life who were always late to everything. One of them was my best friend through most of High School. It never seemed to me to be a big deal. My other friends and I never got angry with him–in fact, we just kind of thought it was funny. Yet he was the one with a car. We relied on him a lot.
So I never felt mad at him, it would have never even occured to me to think I ought to be upset with him, and this even though I had to rely on him alot and even though his lateness caused problems on several occasions.
So that’s an experience. The question would be: How come I and my friends didn’t stress out about this guy’s behavior, when many here seem to think that stressing out and being upset about such behavior is not only permissible, but almost required?
Were I and my other friends doing something wrong? Were we not thinking clearly? Or what?
Yes, and people with ADD get fired. A lot. Their other troubles also contribute to problems at work but those who have lateness will get in trouble if they can’t fix that. So, you see, this bull about ‘choice’ isn’t terribly sensible. Clearly nobody would ‘choose’ to be fired. I’ll bet that at least some of those folks who lost their jobs told you they tried to change but just can’t manage it. So now you have links to stores with alarm clocks and things you can offer the next problem employees.
It’s not. But if you, alice, now have information that your late friend does not, would it kill you to pass it on? No. So kwitcherbitchin’.
For instance? I just keep seeing the same questions over and over. Which I have answered. Over. And over.
I wouldn’t say ‘all’. And why not give people the benefit of the doubt?
Wouldn’t be the default necessarily. First would be my perennial ‘why would this happen? what is the explanation?’. And then I’d consider all possibilities, including that there might be something physical or mental afoot.
My default soon may be that people either have major comprehension problems or else act deliberately obtuse to be provocative, though.
Really not.
Nope.
I did.
Yes, and most of the ‘reasons’ for tardiness you’ll find online, until only recently, were things like being passive-aggressive, being a jerk, etc. In short, the things many people on this thread already believe. Because they never learned better.
People with ADD can be pretty bad at self-awareness and, again (SO sick of repeating myself), it is only recently that it was understood that ADD continues to adulthood. So nobody ever suggested to my BF it might be a problem and even when I figured it out, there was a lot of disbelief by others who still thought ADD was a kids’ disorder only. Unless you work in advocacy, you really don’t understand how little the general public understands about issues like these.
Again, (sighhhhhhhh), one of THE signature characteristics of people with ADD is that their symptoms do not present identically constantly.
And again (and again, and again), the products on those links have been developed only in the last few years. Literally. This stuff is new. Very new. First you have to realize you might have ADD and then you need the wherewithal to go hunting for products for it. Hell, you see people asking SDMB things they could easily look up on the internet. It’s a mistake to assume that everybody is as bright and resourceful as yourself, and even more so to think that everybody understands about disorders.
Hey. You’re a responsible adult, aren’t you? You’re a boss, aren’t you? Why should I have to help you by finding information you should already have?? (see how that works? :rolleyes: ) So here, per others’ remarks, I’ll hold your hand and find some nice informations for you:
Now you’ve got a start, go find your own information.
Never said it so I don’t know where you got it. I said ‘tell them you’ll leave without them if they’re late’. I said ‘lower your expectations’. I said ‘give them the links I gave you’. I’m just saying be understanding while doing the above. Would that kill you?
The rest of your post is a mixture of hyperbole and slippery slope. Not biting.
What nit am I picking? I am not holding you to the .000009 figure. Why should we assume ADD related tardiness even if the odds are one hundred million to nine against it? Is there anything else which should be given this consideration? When you said “it doesn’t matter” was that hypothetical, or real? Do you have any idea what the real percentage is? These are really quite simple questions. Why are you avoiding them? The simplest way to shut me up would be to provide an answer.
My guess is that you're talking about a somewhat different sort of reliance, the sort where you benefit even if he is late. If I were asking someone to give me a ride somewhere, and the alternative was a two hour bus-and-train ride, I probably wouldn't be mad if they were 30 minutes late - the late person is doing me a favor, and I'd prefer waiting to the alternative.
I never encounter those situations. Instead I've had co-workers routinely show up late, leaving others to cover for them on a regular basis or causing the twenty or thirty people present for a meeting or training session to waste a half hour waiting for a couple of latecomers to arrive. Or family members who want a ride and aren't ready on time , making me late to wherever we're going. Or the ones who showed up three hours late to Thanksgiving dinner (although they live 20 minutes away) .Or people who show up late and therefore prevent a group of us from doing what we planned.( Sometimes the group can go ahead without the late person, but not always- you can't bowl in a five-person tournament event if only four people are on time) There's no benefit to me that makes up for the inconvenience.
“High school” would be the salient point. Doubtless your parents were the ones meeting the vital deadlines in your life, like not being too tired to make it to work, and not forgetting the baby at daycare. Kids aren’t punctual, they learn to be as the negative consequences of not being punctual are borne upon them by real life.
If he was late, and you didn’t actually care if he was on time, and never asked him to be, then no doubt to his mind and your mind being late didn’t matter. Just because you weren’t mad that his untrustworthiness made you late to some important things, only mean that YOU weren’t mad that he made you late to important things. Most people, if they care about someone, and know they are being relied on for important things, meet their obligations.
I can’t speak to your relationship to your friend, but if that “important things” you kept missing had actual consequences you cared about in your life (like missing a job, or your flight, or making your BF/GF upset enough to leave you, leaving your child unsupervised at home, etc etc), then I would assume you would be upset. Friends don’t do that to you, because it’s cruel. They say, “I can’t be relied on to take you to (important thing)” or they damn well get you there.
The other thing is time. Your best friend in high school…well you had MAJOR TIME to spend together. I just worked 48 hours this week. I’m very happy to be getting ready to go have Thai with some very dear friends I only see on weekends. This time is PRECIOUS to me, and to them, and we’ll all be there on time. It’s not like we’re going to hang out all summer, or see each other in the hall tomorrow.
Right, and this is something that confused me about your last post. On the one hand, you want my posts to have something to do with my personal experience. On the other hand, you do not allow that my experience and my way of dealing with it generalizes to others’ experience and how they should deal with it.
But if the latter is right, then there’s no reason for me to let my experience have anything to do with what I post here, is there? Who cares about my experience? Its mine, no one else’s.
So what should one do? It seems to me one should offer general arguments that can apply to a wide variety of experiences, and others should evaluate the soundness of these arguments. This can be done by anyone, whether they’ve got driectly relevant experiences to bring into their thinking or not.
Experiences will certainly serve as good sources for test cases and so on, but not everyone in the discussion needs to be able to provide these.
This is incorrect. As I have already noted, people can be incredibly blind about themselves. This is irrational, but it is not cruel.
Aslo, you say you “assume I would be upset.” You assume wrongly. I would be upset at what had happened, and I might resolve not to rely on that person any more. But I can’t see any reason to be upset at the person. What’s in that for me? What’s in it for them? I can’t see a benefit to anyone.
Actually the chances really are pretty slim. I was married to her for 25 years and she never manifested her illness in this manner. Some people manifest their issues using sex as the tool to do that and others manifest it in other ways. I can’t speak towards ADD since I am not as familiar with that mental illness–and I don’t want to hijack this towards another mental illness. I was just using bi polar as an example of behaviors that can also be explained by other means.
But you know some people (both bi polar people and people without any mental illness) just have affairs for lots of other reasons and to assume that because she has a mental illness that is the reason is not rational. Someone who is late might have ADD, but they more likely don’t have ADD.
If someone who was consistently late told me he had ADD, I would take that into consideration. But all I am saying is that it isn’t my default.
I am not upset with them but I would be upset with the situation and would use their behaviors for whatever reason as the basis if I relied on them or even did things with them in the future.
My best friend as an adult is constantly running late, and for years I had a similar situation - he was the one with the car. In fact, in our little group of four of us that get together fairly often, three of us didn’t have cars (I finally got a car last summer). So my best friend will call each of us up to see if we want to get together and do X, and he will set the time … and then be 20-30 minutes late picking us all up.
This would be exacerbated by another member of our group who lives in the basement of his mom’s house (he’s the youngest of our group, and is attending college) who can’t hear the doorbell when we arrive to collect him. So we’re already 20 minutes behind, and then we lose another 10 minutes trying to get this guy’s attention because he’s still wrapped up in a video game and doesn’t realize we’re there. The only time this is really a problem, though, is when we’re going to see a movie. Otherwise, we’re either just going out to eat or we’re all going back to my best friend’s house to watch anime or play cards, so time isn’t a pressing issue.
But the reason it bugs me is simple: I hate waiting around doing nothing. I plan my time so that I’m always doing something. Whenever possible, I adjust my sleep schedule so that I wake up no more than two hours before I’m scheduled to be at work. More often, I get up one hour before work. Why? Because I hate starting something and then having to stop before it’s finished. So by allowing myself minimal time between waking up and leaving for work, I don’t have time to start a project that I’ll have to leave off to go to work. Instead I start my personal activities after work, when the rest of the day is all mine. And it drives me bonkers to finish something 10-15 minutes before I leave, because then I have nothing to do for those 10-15 minutes.
It works the same way when I’m expecting my friend to arrive at a certain time. I wrap up whatever I’m doing and then wait by the front door so that I’m ready to go when he shows up. And then he shows up 20-30 minutes late, leaving me sitting there doing nothing for that time. I don’t dare start a new project, because then he’ll show up before I can finish it … (Of course, this suggests some issues on my part. Obsessive Compulsive? I dunno.)
For similar reasons, I hate arriving more than five minutes early. When I was a kid my mom drove me bonkers because she made sure we always arrived 20-30 minutes early for everything, which again resulted in a lot of standing around doing nothing. Seriously, she had us arriving at church before the preacher! None of my friends would be there yet, so I got to stand around, waiting, waiting, waiting.
When I depended on the city bus to get around, I would often end up at a bus stop well before the bus arrived, and end up deciding to walk instead of sit there waiting for the bus, though this was usually only when I had forgotten to bring reading material. Even the act of riding on the bus was painful if I forgot to bring a book, because riding the bus was very similar to sitting around waiting.
Now, as I indicated in my rather indelicately-phrased post a few pages back (for which I’ll apologize again - I somehow thought I was in the Pit), when it comes to work I can’t deal with tardiness. It makes me angrier than just about anything.
In the scenario I alluded to, I was a breakfast cook and the constantly-tardy person was a dinner cook who happened to be my relief. When you’re a breakfast cook, punctuality is essential. You’re the first person showing up in the kitchen every day, which means you’re the one who turns everything on. And it doesn’t matter what time you show up: the grill still takes 20 minutes to reach the proper temperature, and it still takes the same amount of time to make the gravy. You’ve got a bunch of retired men waiting outside the doors fifteen minutes before the restaurant opens, and they want their damn breakfast the minute they walk in. When you’re late arriving and starting up the kitchen, you find that you can’t even start cooking for those guys until 15 minutes after the restaurant opens. It’s embarrassing.
Meanwhile, by the time the dinner cook shows up, everything is already turned on. The kitchen is ready to go, and everything that needs to be prepped has already been prepped by me. All he has to do before dinner is prepare whatever he has planned for the dinner special, and cook any orders that come in after I leave. So he doesn’t see any downside to wandering in fifteen minutes late. His lateness doesn’t require him to rush around trying to get everything ready, because everything is already ready. The only problem is that I’ve been on my feet for eight hours, in addition to the fact that I walked or bicycled two miles to get there before I even clocked in. And I still have to walk or bicycle two miles back home. I want to get the heck out of there! I’m tired!
And the thing is, I’ll forgive all if you’ll just call and say, “I’m running behind, and I’ll be a few minutes late.” That way I at least know that you plan to show up. It’s the showing up late like it ain’t no thing, without so much as an apology that ticks me off.
Sometimes a phone call and an apology aren’t enough. If their lateness causes me to miss a show or a flight or a train, and this is a habitual latester, the call isn’t going to make a difference to me.
Ask any daycare facility how they deal with latesters. Those who can’t figure out how to manage their time will pay through the nose or will be denied services if it really gets out of hand. Funny how latesters tend to show up when they’re inconvenienced financially or when facilities refuse to watch their children after a while.
I have no concern. It’s all about the consequences with you. I get it. Unfortunately, I am one of those who would in fact cut slack to someone with a reasonable excuse, and would not do so for someone chronically tardy, even with the same consequences in either circumstance. I find it hard to believe that most people would not be in my camp on this, but I’ll take your word for it and bow to your zen-like serenity in evaluating, with Spock-like detachment, the situation in front of you.
Certainly all. Can you name a single behavior that could not be the result of some mental defect, one outside the person’s control?
That’s the question. Given the fact that any act anyone could commit might be the result of some mental deficiency beyond that person’s control, why not? I know my answer. I generally wouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt. Unless someone introduces evidence to the contrary, I assume people are capable of making decisions and acting upon them. Do you apply your same magnanimity in all situations, regardless of the outrageousness of the act?
Adult, yes, responsible, most of the time, boss? Nope. Just a worker who has been incredibly frustrated by trying to deal with an almost-always tardy coworker.
And, thanks for the links, but both end up pointing to same ‘reasonable accommodations’ paragraph that offers three links.
The first leads you the addresses of some ‘teams’ you can email/write/call about issues – I don’t want to take up the time of teams, when as a coworker I can hardly institute any suggested change anyway. I was hoping for just some pages of information.
The other two links get ‘page cannot be displayed.’
Why do you say that? I don’t think there’s any special act of detachment involved. Why treat relevantly similar situations relevantly differently?
On second thought, that’s not the right question to ask. I say the situations I said I would treat the same are relevantly similar situations. You, of course, would say they are relevantly dissimilar. So the difference is in our judgments as to what constitutes a relevant similarity.
I think it is relevant what the consequences of the lateness are, and irrelevant whether the lateness is due to special circumstance or habit. You think both the former and the latter are relevant.
I can argue that they are not relevant: They are not relevant, because it can not make a difference to you why the person is late–it only makes a difference that they are late.
(One’s decision as to what policy to have toward them in the future might turn on facts about why they are late now, but I did not understand you to be talking abuot those decisions but rather decisions whether to wait or not now.
no - there you do the equivalent of “firing” Socially, it’s called “not inviting.” But you can do that without the vitriol attached, without feeling like it’s a personal attack, or without assuming you’ve read John’s mind and know secretly how he thinks and his innermost motives.
When know that John’s chronically tardy. So, you can not invite John, invite John and wait patiently, invite John - but don’t wait, or invite John and get really pissed off. Doing the third option over and over and over again isn’t going to make anything better for anyone. John’s not going to start being on time, you’re going to get more and more angry. Why bother judging and damning John’s character when you can more simply (and I believe more fairly) act on his physical behavior.
You know, I get the feeling that you think of “the boss” as this unfeeling asshat who just loooves to fire people who are REALLY TRYING HARD and just aren’t understood. So someone has undiagnosed ADD in my workplace and that’s why they can’t make it to work to dispatch Boeing 747s. Well, as long as they are undiagnosed I have no right to go around diagnosing them or anyone else. We are extremely open to people changing positions. The people who were fired wanted to have their cake and eat it too: have a more responsibility and pay that goes with it, and also work a shorter shift than the job required. One of the things I tell everyone in the training process is that this job isn’t for everyone.
If someone can’t show up to work on time, I don’t trust them to be able to safely dispatch a 747, which also has many steps which must be done in order and under a departure deadline. So, no, diagnosing mental illness has never been one of the steps in counseling someone who’s not performing up to par. I always ask if they are having some problem that’s affecting them, because, like I said, we are EXTREMELY understanding. Frankly, it’s none of my business what’s going on in their personal life, unless they choose to share. And I work 12 hours a day with these people, doing the same job, pretty much, and I did their EXACT job before I started supervising it, so I both know them very well and understand exactly what their job and job requirements are.
There are some Dogbert bosses out there, but most workplaces have at least some people up the management chain who are trying to make things work out for company and employee alike. I can’t be expected to accomodate for COWORKER who hasn’t met the job requirement, in the absence of any such request from them. (They’re not my employees, I didn’t hire them, and I don’t own the company, I’m not “THE boss”, I’m just the person who’s supervising them, and in this case I’m actually just their shift supervisor. In this case, it means I do the same job as them, except I tend to the stuff that needs more experience, and also get to attempt to smooth customer and pilot feathers when there’s a fuck up in operations. So not only am I well prepared to do every job they do (and do, on a daily basis), I also have to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks so I have to keep an eye that they’re covering their areas as well as whatever area I’m covering that night.
Most “bosses” also have their own “bosses” in our crazy mixed up world, and similarly have to meet their expectations, regardless of our own fucked up ness. It’s bosses all the way up. And some days it becomes obvious that the people running things are equally fucked up, and doing the best they know how to do. And not to turn this into politics, but sometimes the bosses are the MOST fucked up and unable to do the job. But it starts with actually showing up. That’s kinda basic to accomplishing anything in any area.
Okay, and here’s where I’m a bitch. I really PERSONALLY don’t care about some random person’s ADD when they’ve made a commitment to work, meet with, or complete a project for me. They can make their promises based on what they can accomplish just like I do in my life.
If a friend of mine is close enough to share our various diagnoses, THEN I CARE. If my coworker shares that they’re having a hard time for whatever reason, THEN I CARE. I’m not going to cut the entire world a break on what most people can reasonably manage because it’s possible to have ADD. There’s a million ways to be impaired in this world, yet you still want your flight to leave on time, and that’s not going to happen if the bags are late or the fuel is late or the catering is late or the pilot is late. And none of those are going to happen if my stupid coworker is llate and I really don’t care why, at this point.
Just for the record, I personally don’t have vitriol about anyone being late if they haven’t harmed me by doing so. If it’s just a social thing, I find it inconsiderate and rude but I’m certainly not furious or yelling. Somehow it’s being assumed that people who DON’T LIKE to be kept waiting are extremely upset. I DON’T LIKE to be cut off in traffic, I don’t dwell upon it and froth. I think “How rude and unsafe” and don’t do it myself. Similarly with someone who doesn’t show up. It’s only after it’s chronic that you have the OPTION to realize that “John can’t get there on time”. And yeah, I’m going to get annoyed during the period it takes me to realize that, but I won’t demean him or whatever. I may find I no longer want to hang out, because there’s a little too much of me being left hanging involved. Those are all personal preferences, you are free to have different emotional reactions to such behavior.
To clarify a little more when I said “counseling someone who’s not performing up to par”, I’m not the HR department. If they HAVE a problem they tell me about, we refer them to HR, and THERE they may discuss accomodations to their heart’s content with professionals in THAT area, go on long term medical leave, FMLA, discuss changing departments, etc. I talk to them about what they’re doing that needs improved, and offer help and training in any area that I have expertise in if they do want to stay in the department and are willing to change problem behavior.
I also don’t fire people directly, although eventually someone with enough write ups and no explanations or improvement will get called in to talk to the dept manager, and have another chance to explain. (And I don’t think HE’S ever fired someone without at least one warning on HIS side). It’s a whole drawn out process, which they’re free to stop at any point by showing up to work on time, however they manage it.
