My friends who are late for lunch dates

The BBQ Pit
81

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
But let’s say you are my friend. And you’re not in the cold, and waiting doesn’t bother you a lot. You know that when you say 6PM, it won’t be hard for you to be there at 6. You know it will be hard for me. You know that to make 6 with certainty, I need to be there at 5:30 (50/50 I make the 5:30 deadline, say). So you think, “Well, Obsidian will always be the one to wait, because timeliness is the correct behavior, and she should suffer because she is in the wrong.”
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See, now this is just crap. In this example, not only are you hyperbolizing with the “you’re forcing me to be 30 minutes early” thing, you’re setting your own expectations up for failure with the “50/50” prediction, and painting yourself as the victim if you fail to live up to your word when you promise you’ll be somewhere at a certain time. I’m sorry, but if you habitually force people to wait for you, you’re not a victim; you’re a thoughtless asshole. The whole thing just reeks of manipulation, the way some people exaggerate their illnesses to garner sympathy.

The whole “brain damage” thing is a red herring. It’s just not plausible that a large percentage of those who are frequently late have that problem due to brain injury. As someone already mentioned, there’s no magic gene that causes people to be on time—it’s one of those things for which you have to make an effort, some more than others. But for some it’s considerably easier, and I suppose more fulfilling, to turn the tardiness into a personality trait rather than make an effort to change it. “If I can just get everyone to think of me as ‘that guy who’s always late’, they’ll never expect anything more of me! They might even find it kind of endearing!”

Well, I don’t find it endearing. I think it’s fucking rude, and no amount of soggy self-pity is going to change that.

82

[QUOTE=Vinyl Turnip]
See, now this is just crap. In this example, not only are you hyperbolizing with the “you’re forcing me to be 30 minutes early” thing, you’re setting your own expectations up for failure with the “50/50” prediction, and painting yourself as the victim if you fail to live up to your word when you promise you’ll be somewhere at a certain time. I’m sorry, but if you habitually force people to wait for you, you’re not a victim; you’re a thoughtless asshole. The whole thing just reeks of manipulation, the way some people exaggerate their illnesses to garner sympathy..
[/QUOTE]

Oh, fuck off. Nowhere have I said I habitually (or even often) force people to wait for me. I don’t fucking do that. I don’t give my word I’ll be somewhere. In order to be ontime, I need to aim for early. If it’s a familiar place (like work) it’s 15 minutes. If it’s a strange place, it’s half an hour. This is how I have to live my life. THIS is how I make an effort. No one is “forcing me” beyond the fact that timeliness is important to our society, and that is the society I chose to live in, so I must abide by it’s rules. If I want to be on time, I must allow a lot of extra time. This is the standard answer for people who are always late: leave earlier.

About half the time (sometimes more), I make the early, and I am sitting around waiting for that time. I carry a book in my purse. Not predicting, just recounting experience. Calling me a liar just because it makes it easier for you to be a judgemental asshole doesn’t change the truth. Lots of people use this method.

My friends know I’m often waiting around. They know I will turn down invitations because I don’t think I can make it on time, or don’t have time that day to add extra time to the schedule. So they say, “Oh, we don’t mind if you’re late-- just come by whenever.” No one is let down. No one is screwed over. Full cooperation of all parties involved. It’s not rude to be late when the people you’re hanging with have told you it’s ok to be late. I was trying to explain to Heffalump and Roo what I thought their thought process might be. It could be way less complicated than that. It could be they simply don’t give a flying fuck whether anyone is on time for anything. We’re all easy-going people. I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and I be the best friend I can be in return.

Aaaaand, now I’m going to put down the shovel. I get that some people have already made up their minds about people like me, and are going to view me as an asshole no matter what I say, and everything I do say in an attempt to shed light on my situation (hoping to foster understanding, and all that) is only digging the hole deeper. So I’ll shut up now.

(I will say that featherlou’s comment about late people having a poor sense of the amount of time it takes was very illuminating, and I will try to work on that angle. So I thank her for that. When not dodging insults, I have found these threads very helpfull)

83

  1. If it’s ok to be late (i.e., your friends don’t mind), you’re not late.

  2. If you arrive early to compensate for habitual tardiness, that’s great because you’re not late. It is your choice to be early. Fine.

  3. If you’re keeping people waiting for more than a few minutes (to allow for differences on clocks), and it’s habitual, you’re not trying hard enough.

  4. If you’re regularly passing on invitations because you know you’ll be late, my guess is that you really didn’t want to attend in the first place.

84

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
This is how I have to live my life.
[/QUOTE]

That’s how ALL OF US live our fucking lives. Every single goddamn one of us who is punctual is punctual because we are making adjustments and sacrifices in order to make sure we’re on time. It means getting places early. It means potentially being bored. Big fucking deal. We’re adults, and we’re not retarded.

The number of people who seem to want to claim to have brain damage or massive stupidity or retardation in this thread just astounds me. You really would prefer people think you are a brain-damaged retarded person than to be on time? Have at it.

Just look through this thread and find how many of the late people are “exceptions” and “It doesn’t work for mes” and “I’m special.” I know people like to be special and to be individuals, but to make yourself look like you’re actually mentally retarded to do it is freaky, even for the Dope.

85

[QUOTE=jsgoddess]
That’s how ALL OF US live our fucking lives. Every single goddamn one of us who is punctual is punctual because we are making adjustments and sacrifices in order to make sure we’re on time. It means getting places early. It means potentially being bored. Big fucking deal. We’re adults, and we’re not retarded.
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I agree. Maybe part of the problem with habitually late people is that they think there is something wrong if they get places early. Either it’s a waste of their time or it’s a sign of submission or it’s boring or whatever.

But even non-brain damaged people don’t know in advance how long it will take them to get somewhere or do something. So if you make sure that you’re on time most of the time, it will mean that you arrive early a lot of the time.

86

Plan on getting there early, and bring reading material.
(Because even if you are on time, there’s a chance other folks will be running late! ;))

87

One of my oldest friends isn’t so much late; she’s just unable to stick to any pre-arranged plan. We’ll set a date/time, and almost without fail, something will come up. She’ll have to change the time by an hour or two, or want to reschedule for another day.

One weekend, she was bringing her fiance over for an early dinner. The plan was that they’d show up at 4:30. She called up the day before and asked if they could come over at 2:30 instead. I explained that I had some errands to run, how about 3:30? Okay, that was fine. The next day, she called up and said that they were running late, they wouldn’t be there until 4:00. Then, about 3:45, she called and said that they had to make a stop, and they’d be a bit late.

Finally, they showed up at 4:30. Turns out that one of the reasons for them running late was that they stopped at her work for a potluck. So, they weren’t all that hungry for our early dinner. :mad:

88

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
But let’s say you are my friend. And you’re not in the cold, and waiting doesn’t bother you a lot. You know that when you say 6PM, it won’t be hard for you to be there at 6. You know it will be hard for me. You know that to make 6 with certainty, I need to be there at 5:30 (50/50 I make the 5:30 deadline, say). So you think, “Well, Obsidian will always be the one to wait, because timeliness is the correct behavior, and she should suffer because she is in the wrong.” Or do you ever think, “Well, maybe this time I’ll be the one to take a chance at having to wait. She’s my friend, and I don’t like the thought of her having to sit around alone/stressing out/driving like a maniac any more than she likes the thought of me sitting around alone, bored, and staring at my watch.” Compromises are offered to me, and I’m lucky because I have good friends. They are considerate of me, and I am considerate of them. I am not even remotely oblivious. We all work with each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
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Oh, fer fuck’s sake. Get a watch, get your priorities straightened out, show up on time, and quit whining about how hard it is. You’re the one making it hard.

89

I’m always on time to work, with very, very rare exceptions. Why? Because even though I don’t have to leave my house until 6:40 am, I get up at 5:00 am. I go straight from waking into the shower, and after that brush my teeth and so on. I don’t even eat breakfast at home since I’m not hungry that early.

I can hear the complaints about not being a morning person already. Well, I’m not a morning person either. I’m also forgetful and scatterbrained to the extreme. I find many times where I’ve honestly forgotten something that someone’s told me, or been unable to recall being told it in the first place even after being reminded, anything from work tasks to going to see friends. Now that I have a new PDA I’m hoping to cut down on those issues - I was reluctant to use my older one as the battery’s life had become miniscule. If I could find a decent reminder/planner program like that Brat Factor Planner for the Palm PDA format, I’d be thrilled!

I do the same thing for more social/less “required” be-somewhere-on-time deadlines - I may be scatterbrained and procrastinating, but I highly value being on time, so I force myself to get as much of my leaving prep done ahead of time, and then leave earlier than I expect I’ll have to. It takes about 25 minutes to drive to the vet, so I leave 45 minutes before the appointment. 10 minutes or so to get to my husband’s workplace, so I leave 20+ minutes before he expects to be picked up. Yes, I do feel that “but I want to finish this post/E-mail/etc.” pull, and I have to fight it. I spent the better part of a few months training myself to always put my keys in my purse (weekends) or in one specific pocket on my messenger bag (weekdays), and to transfer items from purse to bag on Sunday nights. This is how life goes.

I bring knitting, or a book, or my PDA to play games on, plus my iPod, so I have stuff to do while I’m waiting. After all, that’s probably similar to what I’d be doing at home if I was procrastinating on leaving. Do something similar that’ll leave you feeling like you’re not “wasting” your time - and even if you do, it’s better IMO than wasting another person’s time. I wear a watch from the moment I get dressed for work until I get undressed in the evening. I make it a habit to check it frequently.

I have a sister-in-law who’s the classic scatterbrained type. When she has to go somewhere she’s running around to get stuff done, to the point where she’s being counterproductive - she stops tasks in the middle when just staying on task would get it done faster. She spends time repacking her bags when everything is fine as is. Often she’ll take the train out to the suburbs for family get-togethers, and if she was late for the train, that could mean that the next train (on a weekend) wouldn’t leave for another hour or even two. She procrastinates enough that for many years, she would arrive at the Christmas gathering with unwrapped gifts in bags, and a roll of wrapping paper stuffed under her arm. She’d say hi to everyone then run into a back room and hurriedly wrap everything in paper that was pretty obvious was picked up from some convenience store that day or so, leading one to wonder if she put off finding gifts until the last second as well. Well, even she has been changing her ways - she arrives with prewrapped (and nicely so!) gifts now; she still requires some active “herding” from her husband to get her out the door without dawdling-via-frenetic unfocused activities, but she’s definitely improving.

90

[QUOTE=Ferret Herder]
I’m always on time to work, with very, very rare exceptions. Why? Because even though I don’t have to leave my house until 6:40 am, I get up at 5:00 am. I go straight from waking into the shower, and after that brush my teeth and so on.
[/QUOTE]
That’s the thing. It’s not like a person’s morning routine is frought with unpredictability. Getting ready for work Thursday morning is exactly the same as getting ready Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. What makes it so hard for some people to estimate how much time they need?

Do you have to re-learn how to put your socks on every morning? Does every morning challenge you with a brand new configuration of buckles, snaps buttons and fasteners for your pants that you have never, ever, in your life seen before? Do the city streets magically re-arange themselves overnight? No. If you do the same thing every, single day, how could you possibly not figure out roughly how long it takes?

Do you (general “you” not the quotee) dawdle? Well, stop it. “I just need to finish this one email…” Nope, gotta go, finish it later because I have a bus to catch and it’s not going to wait for me. Crap, the cat puked. Well, too bad, the show starts at 8pm, and the cast of actors and all those musicians are not going to wait for the likes of me. It kind of sucks because it’ll be tougher to clean later, but these tickets were $40 a pop. Gotta go. Shit, I got toothpaste on my shirt! Well, good thing I keep an extra clean shirt in my office in case of coffee spills. I’ll change when I get there…

91

But that’s what everyone does. It’s certainly what I do; I always aim to be early, and if it’s an unfamiliar location, I’m very early. That’s what books in cars are for. I don’t see why it’s a big deal?

92

[QUOTE=dangermom]
But that’s what everyone does. It’s certainly what I do; I always aim to be early, and if it’s an unfamiliar location, I’m very early. That’s what books in cars are for. I don’t see why it’s a big deal?
[/QUOTE]
The burden of punctuality… the cross we must carry.

I feel a country western song coming on… :: strums an A minor ::

93

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
Aaaaand, now I’m going to put down the shovel. I get that some people have already made up their minds about people like me, and are going to view me as an asshole no matter what I say, and everything I do say in an attempt to shed light on my situation (hoping to foster understanding, and all that) is only digging the hole deeper. So I’ll shut up now.
[/QUOTE]

I’m sure you’re a perfectly nice person in real life. But on this topic, in this thread, I’ve seen you make a lot of excuses and troll for sympathy by portraying your own (completely correctable) behavioral quirk as some kind of disease over which you are essentially powerless. It was on that basis I made my comments.

94

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
I find it bothersome in that it’s difficult for me to do. All the positive attitude in the world doesn’t change that it’s hard for me. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it. I don’t get just choosing to feel something. I’m saying this honestly. I don’t understand that. I never have. I hate that it’s apparently not enough that I manage to get my shit together. I have to be happy about it, too.
<snip>
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I think you have the wrong idea about what choosing your attitude is all about. You don’t have to be happy about being on time, but you do have to do the things it takes to be punctual if you put a value on being punctual. If you are trying to be punctual, it obviously has some importance to you, so why bother resenting what it takes to do something that you actually want to do?

There are always people born with the ability to do things we want to do with virtually no effort. For the rest of us, if we want something, we have to do the work it takes to get it. You can do the work resentfully, or you can do the work with the knowledge that you are choosing to do what it takes to get the result you want.

95

You know what, you guys are right.

I told a friend about this conversation, expecting validation, and he told me I was in the wrong. And I realized, this is how I fight. I want to be right, and I want people to understand me, so I beat the dead horse over and over again, splitting hair after hair, listing exception after exception (my best friend calls it the yeahbuts), until it denegrates to shouting and insults (or storming off) because I just won’t concede anything. I react so strongly because I know that I am wrong, and if I admit it you, then I have to admit it to me. It gets out of control, and then I look back and am disgusted by my behavior. I’ve worked hard not to do this in real life anymore, but for some reason the anonymity of the message board has caused me to let it all go and be a total pain in the ass.

I do look for sympathy, thinking if I just dig the hole deep enough, people will come around and say, “Oh, well, of course you’re right.” Because then I don’t have to admit that I’m not special, that I don’t have a right to feel sorry for myself. It’s embarassing to me that I enjoy feeling sorry for myself. The embarassment is helping me to change though. That’s why I’m appologizing right now.

It’s like a I used to be late all the time. And then I wised up and began making an effort to be early. And yet here I am, defending something that I don’t like about myself, just so that I can say, “See? You don’t really need to put out an effort after all.” Like people are going to give me some sort of excuse note for the realities of life. It makes me look like a spoiled brat. (And that would be a direct quote from my friend :o )

My issues are no one’s problem but my own. While I am not exagerating about the details, I am using them as a crutch. I am unjustifiably making them sound like it’s the end of the world. It is my responisbility to work on them. It’s my responsibility to do that without complaining, and without throwing a pity party. I’m no more different or special than anyone else. We all have our problems. Rest assured that this isn’t something that I do often anymore, and I appologize that I subjected you all to it.

Mea culpa, all the way.

96

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
Mea culpa, all the way.
[/QUOTE]

Dayum, I have never seen such a gracious concession. You are a-okay with me.

97

That’s very gracious, Obsidian. I know people with ADD struggle hard to get through their day, but I know that quite a few posters here were just trying to say, “yeah, that is hard to deal with, it’s not a magical gift for most of us, and these are ways we deal with it.”

I know myself the need to “be right.” It’s hard to admit that, or when you’re being that way. Kudos to you.

98

[QUOTE=jsgoddess]
Dayum, I have never seen such a gracious concession. You are a-okay with me.
[/QUOTE]

Why, thank you. :slight_smile:

I’ve come to really believe that, for me, putting the shovel down is not good enough. I need to put the dirt back in, replace the grass, and learn why I chose to make this big mess in the first place. My goal is to be able to know when I’m wrong (and admit it) before I even think about digging.

[QUOTE=Ferret Herder]
That’s very gracious, Obsidian. I know people with ADD struggle hard to get through their day, but I know that quite a few posters here were just trying to say, “yeah, that is hard to deal with, it’s not a magical gift for most of us, and these are ways we deal with it.”

I know myself the need to “be right.” It’s hard to admit that, or when you’re being that way. Kudos to you.
[/QUOTE]

Though it may not have seemed that way yesterday, I do really find that point helpfull. One of the easiest ways for me to validate my pity party is to convince myself that I’m all alone and no one understands my “suffering”. It’s very usefull to me to reinforce that other people do this. It’s a good thing. If I admit that other people face the same challenges without whining, then I know that I can do the same. It’s easy to take an excuse and just run with it, but at the end of the day, my manufactured feeling of “aloneness” does not feel good. Being normal feels good.

99

[QUOTE=Heffalump and Roo]
So far in my experience, every non-punctual person I’ve met or heard about could be punctual if something very important required it. So I agree with stutteringjane that most people can be punctual if need be.
[/QUOTE]

I agree. I am punctual to the point of being neurotic. If I’m writing that last minute email or IM, I’m constantly looking at the time (see that little clock on the bottom right hand corner or your screen? That tells you what time it is!) to make sure I’m not late.

However, Mr. Lezlers and his family are habitually late. I’ve learned that I can’t change their behavior, all I can do is modify my own so as not to let myself be driven crazy by their lack of punctuality. If Mr. Lezlers calls and tells me he’ll be home by 7:30, I’ll expect him by 8:30. That way, if he’s actually on time, it’s a pleasant suprise. OTOH, if he’s late, I’m expecting it and aren’t about to blow an artery. He’s one of those people who get “caught up” in what they’re doing and totally lose track of time. His family is just as bad. To them “1:30” means “anywhere from 1:00 to 2:00.” I’ve taken to dropping his daughter off at his mother’s when she’s going to visit, instead of having his mother pick her up at our house after she strolled in a half hour late more than once, with no excuse or apology, making me late for meetings. She looks at arrival times more as “guidelines” rather than actual times people are expecting her.

On the upside, whenever we’re meeting his family, I can relax and not push him about the time, because I know they won’t care. Same thing with my extended family (my immediate family is just like me with time, probably where I got it from). So long as we arrive within an hour of when we tell them, we’re fine.

100

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
I’m no more different or special than anyone else. We all have our problems. Rest assured that this isn’t something that I do often anymore, and I appologize that I subjected you all to it.

Mea culpa, all the way.
[/QUOTE]
Wow, you are one a-okay individual. Good on ya!

For what it’s worth, my fiancee used to be terribly, terribly tardy all the time (that was before I knew her though). She isn’t chronically late anymore. She learned how to cut off her dawdling time. Her mom siad she was one of those “But it’ll just take 5 more minutes to finish this email/crossword puzzle/repot the plant/change lightbulb…”

One day she decided she just had to stop the dawdling and go when it was time. Just be decisive about distractions, give yourself wiggle room for travel time, and don’t sweat the small stuff. (Catch the cat if he gets out, but if he barfs on the stairs, deal with it when you get home).

You’ll get your rhythm and when you do it’ll get easier to be on time.