My friends who are late for lunch dates

The BBQ Pit
41

[QUOTE=Heffalump and Roo]

While I’m glad you worked this out between yourselves, I’m confused by this behavior. If he can be on time when he knows it matters to you, why is it not possible to make that a habit?
QUOTE]

Because, as she has explained, it takes a serious effort for him to keep track of time. When it is improtant to her, it is worth the effort to him. For mundane things, it isn’t worth the effort. If you have never had a situation where you were reading, or working on a project, or perfoming some task that took concentration and after awhile you checked the clock and found that several hours had passed when it felt like it had been only a half hour or so, then you will never understand how some people have trouble with time. Believe it or not, there are some people who go through their entire lives with that sense of time disconnect. It takes a serious effort for them to keep track of time and not overly focus on time wasting tasks. They must prioritze their efforts.

We all prioritize. Effort vs reward. Meeting someone for drinks isn’t as important as a presentation at work. And answering the phone isn’t as important as your friends. Unless of course, it is your spouse calling from the scene of an accident. Or your boss with an emergency situation at work.

42

I’m glad you don’t find it bothersome. I do. I wish it was different. My life would be much easier. Sucks for me.

Where did you find this? Seriously, I would love to try it.

I, for one, don’t really have a choice. Whether it’s acceptable or not, I have to live with the brain & body I’ve got. I would love to try, say, skiing, but I don’t think it’s wise given my track record with level ground and sneakers. I don’t like it, but that ain’t gonna magically make me coordinated. It isn’t a choice.

I look at it this way: We all have flaws. We work to change them, but I’m not interested in hating myself. I don’t like judgemental people-- I got enough of that from my family. I try very hard. Sometimes I fail. I chose to be friends with people who love me anyway. If someone can’t do that, then I probably don’t want them as a friend anyway.

43

Call me the 5% then. I have been late for:

Getting ready for my best friends wedding. She and the other bridesmaids hung out, ate bagels, bonded, took pictures. . . me, I barely made it to see her get into her dress. That was someplace I desperatly wanted to be. Right now sitting here I’m still sad that I missed that time. It was really important to me.

An interview for a job I was dying to have.

A train taking me to vacation. Missed half a day and threw my whole schedule off. Fucked no one but myself, yet I was late.

I dentist appointment for work I desperatly needed. Paid the full fee for work I didn’t have done, and went home to be in pain for another week.

Calling in to the registrar in college. Suffered through a whole semester of shitty classes I didn’t want, because I was late.

For the love of all that is frigin’ holy, It. Is. Not. Personal. I was once late for dinner with friends because I was stuck in an elevator with 5 bags of garbage. My life is like a cheap sitcom sometimes, I swear.

I have been more than adequately punished over the course of my life by the natural concequences of this. I assure you, there is no one on this planet who wants me to be attentive and timely more than I do. If I could change, I would. All I can do is schedule, organize, remind, remind, remind, and pray.

I’ll be late to my own funeral. The driver of the hearse will get lost, or the back door will break and the casket will fall out onto the highway. My friends and family will see my coffin sitting along the lane dividers on 101 on the evening news and think, “Yep, that’s Obsidian.”

44

I’m another unpunctual, scatty, disorganised person who’d be late to every damn thing if I gave into my nature.

But I don’t. I’m always early, even an hour early. I hate early mornings but I force myself out of bed every morning at 6 am to make it to my 9am job in time - I give myself an hour and a half to get out of the house, when most of my friends take 30 minutes to prepare for work. I don’t allow myself to watch TV or turn the computer on in the mornings, in case they distract me. I was spending the night at a friend’s place last weekend, so I took a book and a drink, and sat in the park around the corner from her house for an hour so I’d be on time. If I’m meeting someone for a drink or whatever, I aim to be there half an hour before they are. It usually means I’m there around the same time, sometimes even 5-10 minutes beforehand.

So, if I want to be punctual, I have to pay the price in time and effort. I gladly pay it, as being perpetually late is inconsiderate and rude, and that’s not the sort of person I want to be seen as.

45

[QUOTE=Revedge]

In my book, friendship sometimes requires effort. If somebody considers my friendship sufficiently mundane that it’s not worth the effort to be on time, then I consider that the friendship is not worth the effort either.

46

My wife has no real concept of how long it will take to do something, or she thinks the optomistic scenario when it’s usually the normal or bad scenario.

I am punctual or early. That’s because I make a great effort to be early. The sales staff I work with hate that because it’s pretty acceptable in China to run on chinese time. You can always blame the traffic. My staff have learned. Our customers are foreign corporations and most people have their day pre-booked to a certain extent and it’s a TS rule.

I work with a manager who is always late. 10-15 minutes. I just love trying to call in while on the road and often in another time zone to be on hold. Ya and an extra FUCK YOU to everyone that doesn’t understand time zones, schedules a “critical” concall somewhere between 10 pm and 5 am, and then are fucking late.

I have my phone/pda/internet browser combo. If I’m early, I can do email, read a book or surf the dope. It’s made waiting for habitually late people tolerable because then they are not seriously impacting my day. I mean, I have about 10 hours of shit to get through every day for work, so if you waste 30 minutes of my day, then I just have to work later. It’s not like I get a pass a work - I couldn’t do x because person y was 30 minutes late.

For those of you that are genetically “incapable” of being on time, look to **amijane ** as a role model.

47

I have a manager that habitually cancels IMPORTANT meetings that have to do with our futures. Like whether or not we even have jobs. It drives me nuts. You rearrange your schedule to be present for the MUST ATTEND meeting and 20 minutes beforehand, she cancels with no explanation.

48

Other people’s punctuality never bothers me. If I arrange to meet someone and the time matters I simply tell them when I will have to leave. So if I am giving you a lift somewhere I will say, “See you about 12.30 but if you get here after 12.45 I’ll be gone.”

If I was meeting someone for lunch and had time constraints I guess I would do something similar, “See you at The Dead Cow about 12.30 but I have to be back at work by 1.30 so I will order at 12.45 whether you are there or not.”

I always take a book with me anywhere that I may be on my own staring into space, so waiting anywhere or being left alone doesn’t worry me. This means that I don’t get annoyed at other people’s lateness and have no reason to feel put out. I think other people appreciate the fact that being late to meet me won’t result in a tantrum.

49

It’s funny you should say that, because the friend that stood me up for lunch last week has severe ADD that he manages not with medication, but by sticking to a strict diet and an elaborate system of little yellow post-it notes. [I have never been to his house so I can’t speak to the state of his walls, but he has an extremely complex binder and strict guidelines for post-it note usage.] He missed lunch because the system broke down (i.e. we had changed plans and he forgot, and he forgot to look at his notes), which is why he missed me that day. It was the first time in my knowledge that he has done so - usually the system is quite effective.

Normally the way I manage my chronically late friends works quite effectively - I don’t make any plans with them that would require me to sit and wait anywhere (e.g. I have them drop by my place when they’re ready (and call and cancel if they haven’t arrived by the time I want to go to bed); meet a group of us somewhere; call me on my cell when they’re ready; etc). In such cases I really don’t care when you turn up. (And I do what don’t ask does re: stating firm timelines. But I still don’t like to have to.)

But there are a few situations where it really is a major imposition on your friends to be late. Movies are one example (once a whole group of us was waiting outside the theatre for my friend who was excessively late [we had his ticket] - one of us (not me) was made to be late for the movie while she waited out for him. If she hadn’t, and he had missed the movie, we would have been stuck with the price of the ticket. He is a jerk for putting us in that position.

Another situation is where there is a cascading effect - your friends are waiting for you so that y’all can go together for another engagement, and you are making all your friends late for the other engagement because you had to answer the phone on the way out the door.

Lunch (as described above) is another example.

50

I play 7 hour chess games, so am used to thinking hard and losing all track of time.

What works for me is to leave loads of time.
For example, my alarm goes off 75 minutes before I need to get to work. My job is 3 minutes walk away from my house. :cool:

If I’m catching a flight, I leave time for traffic, last minute phone calls etc.

51

To mitigate my earlier slight higjack, I’ve started this thread in Great Debates,
Is Punctuality a Choice?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8217164#post8217164
for anyone that wants to explore this portion of the converstaion.

52

I’ll soften my stance slightly to acknowledge that being punctual is a lot more work for some people than it is for others, but I’m still not buying the excuses that people can’t change their habits and attitudes and behaviours. I recovered from a 13 year long anxiety disorder by changing how I thought about things and my habits, behaviours, and attitudes - don’t tell me you can’t adapt your habits to become more punctual.

Those of you who are chronically late and giving examples from your life that make you late, you’re not describing anything that doesn’t happen regularly in peoples’ lives. I could be looking for my sunglasses, keys and purse every day before I leave the house, but I don’t, because my keys, sunglasses and purse are in the same spot every day because I put them in the same spot every day. Clumsy/accident prone? Check. Forgetful? Check. I have systems and habits that help me with these things every day, because it is important to me to be punctual. I also don’t feel sorry for myself for needing to use these systems - if I want to remember to take something with me, I have to go put it by the door when I think of it. If I want to remember an appointment, it has to go on the calendar RIGHT NOW, not later when I get around to it.

But I’ll give you one thing - I always know what time it is, even when I’m sleeping, and how long things take. That’s one thing that’s no effort for me.

53

What gets me is some of the reactions I get when I’m late.

I should preface this by saying that most of the time, I am on time or early. Sometimes by as much as 45 minutes, depending on the circumstances. My friends, OTOH, would often show up as much as an hour and a half late. They had a really lackadaisical and disrespectful attitude about it. I’ve pretty much come to accept this as the way things are.

Then we once decided to have a BBQ at my place. We’d scheduled it for something like 3:30. At around noon I figured I had a lot of time so I went off sailing. When I got back, at around 3:40, I found all of my friends waiting for me, and they were PISSED. They claimed that they’d been waiting for at least half an hour. One guy even brought some new friends of the curvy persuasion, who had since left in disgust because of my extreme tardiness. I countered their charges with a swift “When the fuck have any of you ever been on time to anything?” Their witty response was a feeble “Oh yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Years later, I was to have a business meeting with some show folk. The meeting was scheduled in a coffee house at 7:00. I arrived at around 6ish and wasted some time eating dinner and playing arcade games. When I went up to the coffee house no one was there. I waited. And waited. Figuring I had the wrong place I walked around looking for them. I tried all of their cell phones. (Why oh why do people give their cells as contact numbers when they have no intention of even being in the same hemisphere as their phones?)

Finally, around 8:00, I figured they weren’t showing. I went home. With waiting and travel time, I was out for a total of about 3.5 hours. 3.5 hours of my day just wasted. When I got home, I tried calling one of the people I was supposed to meet. He had finally arrived home.

“Dude, we waited for you for a long time, then figured you weren’t showing up, so we went to another location.”

“Dude, how the fuck long did you wait?”, I countered. “Yes, I was late. I showed up at 7:01.”

“Oh. Sorry, man.”

54

featherlou, I’m so with you on the keys. It drives me batty when other people can’t find theirs. Do they just toss them in a different random direction every time they arrive home? I can’t even conceive of not knowing where mine are at all times. The only time they are not physically on my person is when I’m in the shower.

55

The trade off between being utterly and completely stressed out every time I leave the house, and not doing things that require me to be utterly and completely stressed out every time I leave the house? Yeah. That’s fine with me.

I think what naturally punctual people aren’t getting is that chronically late people don’t roll through life obliviously being late and not caring. I care, very deeply. But I don’t have the skills, tools, whatever it takes to solve the problem, so I can either avoid situations where it is a problem, or I can be miserable.

And I’m not a big fan of misery.

56

That actually happened to my always chronically late mother, right down to the prediction that it would happen. :smiley:

57

You have no clue what a gift that is. Most people do not have that ability. That is why the watch industry makes millions.

58

Me too, and it’s honestly never crossed my mind until this thread that other people couldn’t do it. However, I still believe that people should put in extra effort if necessary to be on time.

59

It’s hard not to get distracted when coming home. People are there talking to me, cats at the door, mail, packages. . . I have a hook I’m supposed to put them on, but sometimes I just. . . don’t. If I’m not paying attention, they go. . . somewhere. God help me if I have things in my hand. Sometimes, later that evening, I’ll think, “Where did your keys go?” and realize I have absolutely no memory of where they went. If not, I have a reminder that beeps me around bedtime to ask me where my keys are, so the search doesn’t have to happen in the morning.

I get frustrated with “How can you not just put X in the same place every day?”. I don’t know. I just can’t. Don’t you think I’d take the easy route if I could? All I can do is to create ways to make sure I do have my keys before the morning.

60

Well, as Revedge said, it requires serious effort on his part. I’m happy that he makes that effort when he needs to, and I can let him slide some when it’s not so important. I can’t expect him to undo 40 years of living one way in the space of a week and become a super-organized person. Marriage is all about compromise, and friendship is a lot about the same thing.

And your statement assumes that he’s not working on making it a habit. He does better all the time, and so do I, with the not biting his head off part. He’s also working on being neater, and knowing where his keys are, since someone brought that up. He’s come to realize that a lot of the reason that I’m on time and organized is because I have established habits that keep me that way. I’m helping him, a little bit at a time, establish those kinds of habits.

We have a container right inside the door now that he uses. When he comes in, he deposits his keys, his wedding ring, his wallet, and his pocketknife in it. He always knows where to look for them now (except for the odd time and again when he’s left everything in the truck for unknown reasons). But before we were married, it never occurred to him to create such a place for that purpose. When he has several chores to complete on a day off, he now makes a list and decides which is most important, and tackles it first. He never thought of doing that before, and can see the value in it. And if I can continue to introduce habits like this to him in ways that are helpful instead of condescending or angry, he’s much more likely to accept them.

Besides, I try to ask myself whether I want to win arguments, or be happily married. Frankly, I’d much rather the latter.