Is punctuality a choice?

[ParentalAdvisory]

@JohnT

And that’s my point: the clock is always ticking and, regardless of whether the Latent has ADD, being chronically late is nothing more than the theft of the other persons life, a constantly-diminishing non-renewable resource… but only for them. Not for the person making them late… they got to spend their time as desired.

I absolutely hate it when people are chronically late, but I just can’t buy this one. Although you make a pretty sound logical reason for not being late, and I do like how you laid it out, people waste time with whole sections of their lives in regards to working and sleeping. The latent sure does a good job of annoying the hell out of us, but the time robbed of being late is miniscule compared to what we all waste.

Basically, we’re all being robbed of our time in some way or another. When it is time to pass, I’m not going to be thinking about the time lost due to tardiness.

[Siege]

QG, you have repeatedly asserted that at least some people who are chronically tardy are that way because of some sort of mental illness, defect, or damage. When I mentioned two close friends who are that way on Friday night who show no signs of any of the above, you said

@Quiddity Glomfuster

**Siege **
Please, please don’t confuse ‘brain damage’ with ‘insanity’. Neither is it the case that people with disorders are incompetent. At least any more than others may be. Your chronically late pal may be a math whiz. It’s not about intellect or sanity; it’s about one portion of brain that governs some behaviours not doing its job well.

Now, my question for you is if there is “portion of brain that governs some behaviours not doing its job well” in such a way that a person is unable to help being chronically late, is it not equally possible for there to be a portion of the brain which doesn’t do it’s job well in such a way that it is difficult for a person to help herself being chronically early?

Earlier in this thread, someone said the prospect of being late causes her discomfort. The same applies to me. Just as people allow for and expect chronically late people to be x number of minutes late, so my friends allow for and expect my earliness to the point where a couple of good friends once argued jokingly whether I was late for something because I was only three minutes early.

Surely it’s a reasonable assumption that if some portion of the brain malfunctions in a way that makes it difficult to impossible for a person to be on time, that portion could cause a person to be early as easily as it could cause a person to be late.

I’m not willfully misunderstanding you; I’m just presenting a logical deduction based on the arguments you’ve presented. Personally, I find it less likely that this brain defect you posit only operates in one direction than I do that it operates in both directions. Then again, what do you expect from one who’s chronically early?

[Siege]

By the way, I showed your post about the possibility of a portion of one of my friends’ brain not working properly. He found the notion foolish and a bit offensive. Please be careful of whom you make that assertion to.

[Kalhoun]

@Contrapuntal

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?

**QG ** can’t respond to this in any meaningful way or we’d have heard about it already. The omission of a real number this far into the thread appears to mean that one doesn’t exist.

[AHoosierMama]

I’m jumping back in to second JohnT. Groaning or eye rolling at his presentation of the fact that you can NEVER get back the time taken from you by the Latent is simply disrepectful, and refusing to try to view things from this perspective while repeatedly banging the look-at-it-thru-the-eyes-of-ADD-sufferers is just hard-headed.

[Contrapuntal]

@Kalhoun

**QG ** can’t respond to this in any meaningful way or we’d have heard about it already. The omission of a real number this far into the thread appears to mean that one doesn’t exist.

So, to re-cap: If the only thing we know about a person is that she is tardy, we have no reason to think ill of her, although it is unlikely to the point of impossibility that that is all we know about someone with whom we have scheduled an engagement, and the assertion that hypothetically, even if only thirty people in America suffer from ADD related tardiness we must treat each person as if she were one of the thirty has been exposed for what it is – baseless rhetorical garbage.

[Kalhoun]

@Contrapuntal

So, to re-cap: If the only thing we know about a person is that she is tardy, we have no reason to think ill of her, although it is unlikely to the point of impossibility that that is all we know about someone with whom we have scheduled an engagement, and the assertion that hypothetically, even if only thirty people in America suffer from ADD related tardiness we must treat each person as if she were one of the thirty has been exposed for what it is – baseless rhetorical garbage.

I think you have an accurate grasp of the Earth-shaking problem of ADD-Related Tardiness.