Is punctuality a choice?

Great Debates
101

Not really. If we make a date for 5:00, 5:00 is the latest time I expect both of us to arrive. Both you and I are free to get there as far ahead of, or as close to that appointed time as we wish. Just like you would expect if going to a movie. Nobody, to my knowledge, tries to lay blame elsewhere for “their time” being wasted if they arrive at the theater a half an hour before the film starts.

Your equivalence of “my 15 minutes before” v. “your 15 minutes after” just doesn’t wash in real life. Try consistently showing up 30 minutes early for a job, then arrive 30 minutes late every day for a while, and compare the reaction you get.

102

“You claim to love me, but you’re always late.”

In this thread, we are clearly dealing with a very deep difference in ways of thinking. I can not even imagine a rational person saying the above–yet I know that in fact, rational people can say it, as I have seen on this very thread. It’s like you’re some kind of alien being from another world as far as I’m concerned! :stuck_out_tongue:

-Kris

103

You are accurately describing the convention we are discussing, but you are not addressing my point about one way people are justifying their reaction to one’s failure to conform to that convention.

If you say “this is the convention, this is just how we do it,” then I don’t have an argument for you. But if you say “you should be willing to waste some time by waiting for me to get there at five,” then it seems to be open to your interlocutor to say “you should be willing to waste some time waiting for me to get there at five fifteen.”

I’m not arguing that its okay to be late. I’m arguing that the “you should be willing to wait on me” defense of sticklers for punctuality doesn’t work. The argument is a hypocritical one, at least as its been formulated on this thread.

-FrL-

104

ADD? Half my office are freakin retards.

105

No. That’s ludicrous.

My rule is that people should be able to handle a five minute period of lateness and waiting. So don’t yell at me if I’m arriving five minutes after the appointed hour, and I won’t get snippy if I had to wait that amount of time. If I arrive five minutes early and end up waiting ten minutes, well, that’s not your fault. But if I arrive at the appointed hour and end up waiting ten minutes, well, yes, I will be a little impatient. We came up with an appointed time and we should both strive to hit it as close to possible. It should be a mutual effort. And if we’re frequently having dates, neither one of us should feel more responsible about the time than the other. I shouldn’t always be the one who arrives on time and has to wait. But if it happens occassionally, no biggie.

Sometimes you cannot really afford to wait for someone. Let’s say I’m supposed to meet you at your place so we can catch the last rush hour train together. I can wait for you if we have lots of time to spare, as I would expect you to do for me. But if the train is due in five minutes and you’re still putting on your fake eyelashes, I’m sorry but I can’t wait. The difference between waiting when you’re early and waiting when you’re late is huge and shouldn’t be treated similarly.

106

Well, if we’re trying to have lunch together somewhere, and I have no idea if you’re showing up or what, because you don’t find 15 minutes worth calling over, do I order? Do I wait on you? If I order, and you show up half an hour late and then order, I’ve had to eat by myself and your food is going to come as I’m leaving. In other words, I made these plans so we could have lunch together, but you think I ought to be grateful that you’ve given me this opportunity to read my book or explore my innermost self.

I’m not requiring you to show up early, I’m just requesting that, especially since I only have an hour for lunch, that you show up in time to eat lunch with me. If I wanted to read my book, I wouldn’t have invited you. Like somebody else said, if we’re going to a movie, I don’t care how early you get there, I don’t care how early I get there, but we both better be there when the movie starts. It’s not about “who has to wait”, it’s about what time you’re supposed to be there!

107

Yes, it is a convention, largely borne out of the fact that time moves in one direction. You can arrive at 4:45 and be present at 5:00, but (until personal time machines are perfected) you cannot arrive at 5:15 and be there at 5:00.

And there’s nothing “hypocritical” about it, unless one accepts your shaky premise that 15 minutes = 15 minutes, regardless. The fact is that you are responsible for when you arrive; I am not. I will neither take blame for your late arrival nor feel guilt at your getting there early. You don’t want to “waste” time, manage your time better.

Indeed, as it’s difficult for me to understand how a rational person can fail to realize that consistently failing to fulfill one’s promises, including being where you say you will when you say you will, shows a real lack of consideration toward the person(s) you are inconveniencing with your unreliable behavior.

Obviously you are from Mars, while I am clearly from Uranus.

108

I hear the sticklers saying “you should be willing to risk waiting on me to ensure that you arrive on time”. No one is saying you should arrive early. But being the early arriver is definitely preferable than being the late arriver when it comes to showing respect. If someone is willing to give up an extra minute just so they can avoid offending someone by being tardy, that’s classy. I’d rather be with someone who doesn’t want me to wait than someone who takes for granted that I will wait.

109

The thing is, most of the time there’s no penalty to arriving early, and there is a penalty for arriving late. We miss the first part of the movie. We lose our dinner reservations. I have to get back to work at a certain time. We miss our flight. In other words, you being late is having a serious effect on others, unless they want to board the flight without you (and isn’t it the point that we’re going to Maui together?) Your inconsideration has, in fact, taken something from the people you’re supposed to be meeting.

110

Word. You have no responsibility to arrive early, but you do have a responsibility to arrive on time. For me it’s better to be ten minutes early than five minutes late. As I’ve already mentioned, I’d rather be the one waiting. My one philosophy in life is “do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience anyone else.” But I suppose it’s a matter of personal priorities.

111

Without context, I suppose it sounds weird. What you don’t know is the kind of reasons he gave for being late: a phone call from a friend and he wanted to get caught up on the past; having a beer with office mates after work; his brother calling for help working on a car he was rebuilding; wanting to finish reading a magazine; seeing a sale sign in a store window and remembering he wanted to upgrade his stereo, etc.

Now, all of those are fine things to do BUT if you know that you have made plans with your girlfriend to meet at the Tropical Moon at 7pm for dinner, and it’s currently 6:45 and it’ll take a good 20 minutes to get there then IMHO you ought to make heading for the Tropical Moon a high priority. Instead, he decided he wanted to do these other things more than he wanted to keep to the plans he’d made with me.

And, frankly, if a boyfriend doesn’t consider spending time with you pretty high on his priorities, or is so rude that he thinks leaving you to sit around waiting for him needlessly doesn’t matter, or even simply isn’t the type of person who keeps his word when he says he’ll do something… Well, I think crossing his name off your list and moving on is the sensible thing to do.

112

I have a boss who is consistently late to a weekly meeting - with people from other departments - every single time. It makes him and our department look like we don’t care about the important meeting and about the other people there, and typically the meeting cannot start until he arrives.

He’s also late in arriving on days that we see research patients. These patients are typically there for very long visits anyway (a few hours!) and so my coworker and I try our best to make the visit go as smoothly as possible - but when he’s late a half hour or more, that completely fouls up our schedules, and messes with every patient who arrives afterwards as well - so even if those later patients are on time, they’re still delayed as a result. Oh, and he refuses to carry a cell phone, so we couldn’t even find out how delayed he’ll be. He acts resentful if we even remind him of how early he has to see a patient on a particular day, and he avoids telling us about things that will be happening until the last minute - anything from “let’s have a meeting” to “we’re having a candidate for the job opening in today” to “oh yeah, I hired so-and-so.”

I have a sister-in-law who is such a procrastinator in getting ready that she has at times missed the infrequently-running train to the suburbs, resulting in her having to take a train an hour or two later. Not only does this throw off dinner, but someone has to get up during the family gathering, get their coat on, and drive a couple miles to the train station to pick her up and bring her back to the house. (She, however, is improving a lot in this respect through serious effort on her part, and that of her husband pushing her.)

There’s another sister-in-law who between she and her daughter are such huge dawdlers that they’re never on time. We avoid whenever possible being the ones who pick them up to bring them somewhere, because they wouldn’t be on time and then we wouldn’t either.

I posted about this in the thread in the Pit - I am terribly scatterbrained, forgetful, disorganized, and frankly think I could well have ADD at times. I have poor short-term memory and can’t even pick up a few things at the store successfully without a list. At times I can’t even vaguely remember that someone asked me to do something/be somewhere, so I try to write down as much as I can. I even get distracted while playing video games and want to pay attention to something else. However, I suck it up and force myself into habits that improve things for me and people who interact with me. It took months to finally implement consistently my “keys go here” habit. My PDA is my auxiliary brain, and if I’m wearing clothes, I’m wearing a watch - and checking it pretty frequently. I don’t do the “one last post/check E-mail/answer that call” when I should be getting my stuff together and leaving; yes, it’s hard, that’s the way it is. I force myself to get my stuff together well before I have to be out the door, and just leave the coat-on part for when I’m about to go. I leave for somewhere around twice as long ahead as I know it takes - over 20 minutes ahead to pick up my husband 10 minutes away, 45 minutes ahead for a vet appointment that’s 25 minutes away. Then I bring something to look at/do in the meantime (knitting, book, PDA, iPod, etc.) because dammit, it is not a fucking stressful imposition to get somewhere on time, it is life, and it is respectful of other people.

113

When growing up, it was never okay to be late to a meeting, appointment, or dinner. Often enough, we were there early. Why this insistence? I was on the lowest rung of the hierarchy, and my schedule had to be completed on time in order to make sure that everyone else was on time. This meant that I got to school, work, etc. early every day. If I wasn’t ready by the time everyone else was, I left without being fully prepared for the day.

To complicate things, I am nearsighted. I started out being mildly nearsighted in the third grade, and I rapidly got worse over the next few years. Part of how I adapted to make sure that my scheduling didn’t upset anyone else’s was to employ two methods: 1) make sure that I put my things out beforehand in the same place every time in an organized manner (this really isn’t that difficult) and 2) if I put something in a different place for any reason, I memorized its location. If this meant repeating it in my head several (hundred) times until I remembered it easily, I did it. I still do that for things that are not going to easily stick in my head.

I’m on time for work just about every day. Most days I’m 10 to 15 minutes early because traffic wasn’t so bad. (I calculate for bad traffic because it’s super common for someone to have gotten into an accident along my route to work.) I know how long it takes to get to work on a traffic free day (20 minutes) and how long it takes on a bad traffic day (40 minutes). I set my alarm for a certain time, and if I don’t get up at that time, I don’t have as much time to get everything done. I prioritize what is absolutely mandatory, and I have days when I take too long in the shower. Navel gazing happens sometimes, but I don’t allow it to make me late. My goal is to be ready to leave by 8 am; if by 7:45 I am ready except for eating, I grab food on the way to work and worry about ingesting it on the way there or when I get there. (BTW, I have to be at work by 8:30 am.) If I do not do one or two things by the time I leave (eat breakfast, make lunch, wash hair), I have coping mechanisms. I keep spare lunch in my desk at work in addition to snacks, I will braid my hair back to hide the greasy hair, and I know that I can always pick something up on my lunch hour if I forget lunch. (There’s also the lunch truck at 10:15-30 in case I forget breakfast.) I’m not nearly as busy as I used to be, and I am completely in control of my schedule these days, especially in comparison to when I was in school.

While in college, I took the bus. The last year I was in school, I didn’t live a walkable distance to campus, so I had to make sure that I was able to catch the bus. Yes, I’d be 20 minutes early, but I had time filler options to make this perpetual earliness tolerable. (Computer labs, a book, homework, and music were all viable options.) In my last semester of college, I worked 40 hours per week between my internship and my paying job, and I took two regular classes on top of it. I had little control over whether the bus would be late or early, so I got to the stop 5 minutes early every day. Yes, this would mean that I’d be waiting, but I always had a small textbook or something I could be reading while I waited. I did a lot of waiting, but I prioritized those chunks of time into time spent doing something productive. The only way that I didn’t go a little crazy while doing all that I did is because I kept myself on a highly organized schedule. This included cleaning, laundry, homework, and social time. If I didn’t do things on a regular routine all the time, I wouldn’t have made it. I also padded my time allowances for things I couldn’t control, like the dog getting sick or me having to change my clothes for whatever reason.

I developed a LOT of organizational coping methods to make sure that I was on time or early because I was taught all throughout my childhood that being early was more important because of the possibility of inconveniencing others. I can’t really relate to the idea that you can’t eventually learn to control how late you are, but I do know that it’s an effort to make sure you’re consistent with time-keeping. (My watch is my best friend, and if I can’t find it within a reasonable amount of time, I give up and move on. It will show up somewhere when I have more time to look for it.)

For me, being consistent is the key to being on time and organized the majority of the time. This has also been true of my friends who were severely ADD/ADHD; if they got distracted from their schedule or tasks, they would lose control over their organization and timekeeping skills. It’s entirely possible to work up to this, and it takes a lot of time, patience, and for most people, experimenting until you get it right.

Why the focus on being on time? It’s all about respect for both myself and the other person. Being consistently late or unreliable does not project a positive image, and not caring enough to uphold a set of behaviors that are interpreted by others as positive and respectful (and acknowledging of your actions having an effect on others) of the people around you, people are going to make assumptions that may not be fair in a broader context, but will be reflected on the reliability of your timekeeping.

114

Interesting.

Everyone in my family is chronically late, which might explain why I hate being late SO MUCH. I’d personally rather crawl in a hole and die than show up late somewhere. Most of the time, especially with job interviews and other crucial and potentially life-changing events, I’m early. During day to day things like school and work, I stick with a routine and usually fare pretty well. Some times stuff happens and I show up 5 minutes late. It doesn’t happen very often.

When I am egregiously, egregiously late, it is always because I’m terrible with directions. Put me in a car in my own damn neighborhood and I just can’t find my way around. My most recent late horror story was my consultation for getting my wisdom teeth extracted. I busted out the Mapquest, printed out directions, wrote down the phone number, and asked my husband for directions. I left 20 minutes early in case of traffic. It took me-- get this – one hour and thirty minutes to find the place. Most of that hour and a half was spent casing the street it was supposed to be on. I called the office repeatedly but nobody picked up. I called my husband to verify directions and he had a sudden memory lapse. Finally he got to a computer and verified the phone number I had written down. It was of course, incorrect. I immediately called the office in a panic and learned that I was parked about thirty feet from their office.

I was AN HOUR LATE. She said, “Don’t feel bad. I got a call yesterday from someone else across the street. Nobody can find this place.” Fortunately for me they still fit me in for consultation.

I was so shaken up by that experience that the next time I had an appointment for both me and my husband, I dragged him into the car a day before and we “practiced” driving there. It took some extra time, but I guarantee you on that day in which we were rushing from work to the office it gave us a lot more confidence about where we were going, and we arrived early.

And that’s I think one of the things that separates punctual people from non-punctual people: we learn from our mistakes. I’ve been late before–as I said, mostly from getting lost–but I always remember why I was late and double-check that factor so it doesn’t happen again. Once I was forty five minutes late for some thing because of a traffic jam and incorrect directions. When I called the place I was supposed to be, they had no idea where I was, how to give directions to their establishment, and didn’t even know I was supposed to be showing up that day or why! It was partially due to incompetence on my boss’ part–not only did they give me completely incorrect directions, they also told me it would take an hour to get there when in truth (considering traffic) it was closer to a two hour drive – so what did I do? Anytime they tried to send me anywhere I didn’t trust their directions. I confirmed their directions with other people before I went.

So from my perspective that’s what punctuality is all about – learning from your mistakes, and controlling as many variables as you can possibly manage to minimize the odds of screwing up. If you’re running late, always, always call and give an estimated time of arrival. Always.

Now keep in mind, I have an atrociously late family. Even my best friend is chronically late. My grandmother is so bad she often will just call two hours after she’s supposed to show up and say she can’t make it (and anyone who makes a snarky comment about how selfish my Grandma is is going to HEAR FROM ME about it.) Am I going to disown my freakin’ Grandma or my best friend? No. I get furious when they don’t show up, but the instant they do all that self-righteous masturbation goes right out the window and the anger vanishes instantly. Why? Because the reason I was pissed in the first place is not that they “don’t respect my time” but that I was really excited to see them and I’m sad our time together is being cut short.

Generally, and this may be partially due to how I was raised, time is of the ESSENCE when it comes to professional engagements, but when it’s about family and friends we mutually understand “shit happens.” As long as you call it really doesn’t matter in our family. That’s part of what community is about–embracing others despite their flaws, not judging their moral worth on something so arbitrary as punctuality. I’ve learned to accept that some people are just flakes. Most likely all these people who are being crucified in this thread for daring to ever be late are just flakes. Don’t take it personally. Some people are just flakes.

And I just wanted to add, because I haven’t seen it mentioned yet, as far as I understand this idea of Sacred Punctuality is completely cultural. There are some cultures where it’s perfectly acceptable to show up for a business engagement 45 minutes late and hang out and shoot the shit for hours before getting down to business. This might be starting to change with the Westernization of many countries’ business practices, but what I’m trying to point out is punctuality is not by a long shot a universal moral value.

That’s all.

ETA: So nobody thinks I’m insulting them, my actual definition of “flake” is “Someone who is easily distracted and often unintentionally loses track of time/conversations/etc.”

115

I am habitually late – I can’t tell you why but I can tell you that it isn’t because I don’t respect the people I’m meeting. I am constantly worried and trying really hard to get places on time, it just doesn’t work out very often. The person who mentioned having a clock in every room of the house made my blood pressure triple with that one statement. My mother works in cultural competency, that is helping people in business and other disciplines to understand how to work across cultures, and I can say that having to be somewhere at a precise minute is a concept that is foreign to a large portion of the world. We evolved to do things at instances that spanned more than 60 seconds. The difference between darkness and morning is not marked every day at 6:32 am. Our biology does not care about such a precise unit of time. If you have a talent for being somewhere at a preordained moment, that’s great, and I can see why getting things together within a five minute window is crucial for business as it exists. But there is no reason to look down upon people who are habitually late, or to think that they disrespect you. I, for one, can be on time for a one-time event, but if I have to be there on a regular basis, it’s either I mostly succeed, or I have a huge level of anxiety all the time. Many times when I’m late for work, I woke up several times in the early morning because I was nervous that I’d missed the alarm to wake up and go to work. Then I am so tired that I sleep through the real one.

116

That’s where the disconnect occurs in this thread. Those “on the other side of the aisle” would counter that you may well tell yourself that you respect these people. But in practice you don’t do the things you need to do to demonstrate respect, which is more important.

The punctuality contingent would tell you that if you can find a way to make it to a “one time event” on time then you’ve conceded that you can decide to be punctual and figure out a way to make that happen. After that it just becomes a question of whether you’ll apply that discipline in any given instance or conversely decide it’s not worth the effort.

That’s what I happen to believe. I am a very punctual person, and I pay a price for that. I always allow too much time to get places, too much time to get ready, and the more important or urgent the event is, the likelier I’ll find myself circling the block or sitting in an airport way ahead of time. So in my mind, when someone makes me wait they have done a similar cost-benefit analysis in their head that told them I am not important enough to pay the price to be punctual. Someone else in the thread already made the point, that if you needed to show up on time somewhere to get a million dollars, you’d find a way, because that would be important enough for you. When you don’t, it was because you effectively decided it was not important enough for that effort.

117

I’ve enjoyed this thread. It’s too bad I was late in read it. :smiley:

118

wrong thread sorry

119

Like I said before, if people are truly oblivious to the meaning of time, you would expect them to get places early as well as late in nearly equal measure. That doesn’t happen however and the problem lies in getting anything done within a set amount of time. Another word for being constantly behind other people is retarded.

120

The disconnect plays the other way for at least some of us. I myself don’t feel disrespected by people when they are late, and I can’t understand why anyone would. The connection between respect and being on time just isn’t there for me and others like it seems to be for some people.

-FrL-