Three mod notes for one post, two by the same mod! That’s got to be some kind of record.
I left a bad review. That’s all you can do because you do not want to get all shirty with people in a country where robberies are endemic and the police are hopelessly corrupt.
I guess ripping off people is a valid business strategy to you, because it’s the ripped off’s fault for not minimizing their loss by getting upset?
Wow!
I said nothing of the sort. I could be upset; I could be annoyed. What I don’t want to do is be pissed off in such a way that it effects my enjoyment of my vacation. If being pissed works for you, like I said, go for it. It doesn’t work for me. I can do my best to remedy the situation in a way that does not cause me undue disturbance.
Next time, vacation in Germany.
And again you miss the complete point of the thread. This is about people that are late all the time. Maybe you’re right when I say “Little Nemo, I want to leave at 9 so get ready.” but you are completely ignoring that these same people are late when THEY set the time. “Cad we really need to be leaving at 9.” then YOU aren’t ready until 9:20. Is it selfish of your boss that they expect you to be at work at the start of your shift and you are always 10 minutes late?
It seems to be an argument from a few posters in this thread to take one scenario where it may be socially acceptable to be late or unimportant to be on time and then turn it back on the punctual folks that they are the oppressors. But I find those arguments disingenuous because those posters
A) Also show up late when it is important to like being late to a job interview or late to the airport. Your “It’s your fault for being monochronic” wouldn’t apply would it? Why are you late in those situations?
B) Or they show up on time to something important. If that is you then you are not the person being addressed in the OP since you can show up to something on time if you care enough.
No (true story). It was because my mom invited her friend over for family Thanksgiving dinner and she asked if we could dress up a little to make it nice for her friend. I could have said no I’ll dress like I want to. I could have said yes then showed up in cut-up jeans and an old t-shirt. But I chose neither of those. I said yes and wore slacks and a button-down shirt.
So what would you think if I agreed to wear nice cloths then went over there in pajama bottoms and stained t shirt because I’m not going to let her tell me how to dress?
I was reading this and I thought of Thorny Locust’s reasoning of ‘You said 10 but you didn’t make it clear you meant 10. A lot of people say 10 and don’t mean 10’ It’s this thinking that somehow the tautology X=X doesn’t apply.
These posters’ argument boils down to
You ask for X and I agree OR I tell you that I will give you X
I don’t give you X
I’ll accuse you of being unreasonable for expecting me to give you X
This is a very different argument than other posters that honestly seem to have a mental/emotional problem with getting out of the house on time. Those are the posters that wait until 5 minutes before it is time to leave to take their 25 minute shower, get dressed, do a load of dishes, sort the mail, etc. then get stressed because they’re late.
So judgmental.
Are you saying that Mighty Mouse should be so Vulcan in his emotions that he can just decide not to be pissed at that? I mean his actions he can control so MM don’t punch the concierge. MM don’t sit pissy in your room all day. MM don’t stand in the lobby and go all Karen at the top of your lungs. Those would be fine but to tell him not to be pissed and bury his natural emotions? I guess you’re just a better person than we are who get upset at that sort of stuff.
The trouble is, there isn’t any one answer to this. I’ll give you a list off the top of my head:
- Women often simply have 100 more things to take care of in a day than men do. From hair to make-up to finding the right shoes for an outfit to getting the kids out the door, all these tiny things add up and none of them are really eligible to be skipped. You take care of them all as they hit without realizing that the 100 10-second fixes have now made you 15 minutes late.
- Ask ten people to define “on-time” for a movie. You may be surprised how many different answers you get. I have no interest at all in being there for the previews and commercials; a couple of years back I discovered to my surprise that I was driving a dear friend to distraction by “constantly making us late” for movies.
- Miscommunication. I can’t tell you how many times I have asked someone what time they want to leave the house, and they have responded with the time we need to be there. Don’t lie to me about the time, just tell me what time you want to be leaving my house.
- Traffic. I live less than two miles from the busiest intersection in the Western hemisphere. If you ask me to meet you somewhere at 6:00pm on a Friday night, you get what you deserve. I will do my best.
- I have ADD. I do not feel time pass. I could be in the shower for 6 minutes or an hour and not be able to tell you until I step out and look at the clock.
- Different daily habits. Some people are always ready to go out. They shower every morning and put on hard pants, and usually find khakis just as comfortable in blue jeans. So they notice the time, check their hair, maybe brush teeth and head out the door. I’m not getting out of my sweatpants unless I have to, so give me some notice.
- Social anxiety. I am an extreme introvert, so getting myself together for a social gathering is a bit like running through soft sand. I really don’t want to go, even though I know I’ll be glad I did, but everything just takes longer when I’m forcing myself to do it.
- Familiarity. Most of the time, on-time people set appointments in areas and places they are familiar with. I am more likely to be willing to step outside my comfort zone, which sometimes ends in problems like finding parking or missing the on-ramp.
In general, the people I know who are dedicated to punctuality keep their lives very simple. The have well-edited minimalist wardrobes and don’t take responsibility for getting their kids out the door. They have short, easy haircuts and wear little if any make-up. They outsource a lot of their house and yard work. In short, they don’t quite realize the extent to which their lives revolve around being on time. It will never be that important to me.
I’m not saying what he should do, and I’m not judging him or his wife as bad people. Certainly not. Perhaps I could have been clearer. (I am most definitely not asking for a Vulcan like rejection of emotion. Emotions are good.) I’m offering an alternate way of looking at things that can be mused upon or rejected. I won’t think anything less of anybody or myself if they don’t agree or think I’m full of shit. And, yes, I get upset. I get rageful. I’m an imperfect human bing and a nut job like everyone else. I do make a conscious effort to curb some of the worse elements, the ones that cause me distress,!in order to enjoy the rest of my years as best I can. I am not unique in this regard and I often fail. I am certainly not a “better person” as you put it — people cannot be ranked.
And that’s reasonable. Given that, I assume that you don’t make commitments to be at a certain place by a certain time because you know yourself. The exception is the movie thing which was a miscommunication that was resolved.
Take my ex-gf that I mentioned up thread. When I am driving through where she lives now, we will often make lunch plans. The place where we like to meet is a 30 minute drive for her and would be a four hour drive for me. Most of the time I just need to be at a hotel sometime later that night. If she is fifteen or 30 minutes late, no biggie because the place doesn’t take reservations. One time I did have somewhere to be later that evening and I had a potential time crunch. We agreed to skip lunch that time because, as she put it, “you know how I am.” She didn’t make a commitment that she couldn’t keep. She learned not to do that.
That’s not true for me. Yes I don’t wear makeup but then again I can’t just pull my hair back in a pony. If we have to be somewhere on time I do pretty much all of the morning chores otherwise we’d be more late and back when the kids were at home that did include getting them up and ready. When I do the yard work I have to monitor the time to make sure I get dinner ready on time. And no when I say dinner on-time I not that punctual that we have a set dinner time; it’s a range of time between people getting home and comfortable and people going to bed. Since one of us gets home late and the other gets up early I don’t like to be too early or late with dinner.
I work full time at a demanding job, I am a very involved father, I sit on three town committees and the boards of two industry associations. I volunteer at a food pantry and a homeless mission and am consistently among the top fund raisers for each. I couldn’t do any of this if I pissed away hours a week not scheduling my time carefully, because you know, that’s so Vulcan. That’s why it pisses me off when people aren’t on time. Usually the worst offenders are stay at home parents or retired people.
We had to kick a kid off a soccer team. Her mother did not believe in “rushing her on weekends”. The kid was very upset. She said she was standing on the driveway crying for an hour because she knew was going to be late again (this was an eight year old kid so take the “an hour” with a grain of salt). Problem is we kept either having to drive like a bat out of hell for away matches or leave the kid behind and play a sub short. We would also need to wait at the club when we returned for the mother to come pick her up. So some parent and one or more kids would be waiting delaying their lunch because someone’s mother wasn’t going to submit to the tyranny of clocks. Of course when we cut the kid the mother was livid. What’s a defaulted game or two if you can enjoy a relaxing Saturday morning?
This is hardly what anyone would describe as a typical example.
It’s typical in my experience and comes through loud and clear from what many people are saying here. To people who are chronically late, impacts on other people are other people’s problem.
Sorry, I think I had you conflated with somebody else. You have been repeating that you think being late is breaking a promise, but you don’t appear to have been assuming that a promise of showing up at a precise time has been made unless that’s been made explicit.
People do and should make sacrifices for their friends, yes. But they get to choose which sacrifices. And they get to do so based on their own circumstances.
If being there on time costs Person A 20 minutes’ worth of attention in addition to getting dressed and travel time and doesn’t mess up anything else, and being there on time costs Person B (in addition to dressing and travel time) six hours’ worth of attention and means that they therefore finished an important report late, or didn’t console their crying child, or screwed up a piece of artwork that was supposed to go in the show, or I could think of a whole lot of things – the sacrifice being expected isn’t equal.
This can be discussed and worked out between them. But if the relatively-easily-on-time person is refusing to even acknowledge the issue, that makes it difficult. And if the late person has run into too many people who won’t acknowledge the issue, or will acknowledge it only by blamng the late person for having it, they may be reluctant to bring it up.
Such as, for instance, if they have reason to think the other person has already decided what the late person’s motivations and reactions are.
I don’t get annoyed about waiting for other people in the same fashion in which other people sometimes have to wait for me. Most of the time it genuinely doesn’t matter.
I would be wondering why you wanted to wear a suit and tie to the market in the first place, and would most likely have asked you why this was such a big deal to you that you were making promises about it, and whether you were expecting me to dress up also. Depending on your answer, I might then have explained that I don’t own the clothes you were expecting me to wear.
I certainly wouldn’t assume that if you just suggested going to the market, that meant I was supposed to show up in a dress and heels.
Yup. That works just fine; presuming that your friends have some idea how long it takes to get to the restaurant from your place. If you need to leave your house at 6, and you’re inviting them over at 5, there’s unlikely to be a problem. It’s the case where somebody gets angry at the person who didn’t show till 5:30, even though there was still lots of time to get to the restaurant, that’s the problem.
That’s the definition of being non-punctual. You seem to be expecting people to be punctually non-punctual, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Did you pay for 11 things? Or did you pay for x days’ stay during which you could take your choice of whichever things were actually available?
They were assuming that if you were in Jamaica, you would follow Jamaican cultural time. You were assuming they would follow USA corporate time, or the time of your specific social group. Checking assumptions is a good idea, for both parties, but they weren’t the only ones who didn’t check this one. Unless they promised that you could fit exactly 11 things into the length of your visit, they weren’t doing anything Wrong. They were doing things Differently.
10 is a precise figure in a math class. 10:00 is not a precise figure in many situations in many social groups, as has been said repeatedly by multiple people in this thread.
Many words in English have multiple meanings. That’s how the English language works. That’s how people work. If you’re going to try insisting in all aspects of your life that words mean only what they mean according to their precise definitions in math and/or in a particular science, you’re going to run into a whole lot of problems.
It doesn’t. This isn’t a math problem or a logic class. It’s a language and cultural issue, and, in language, X can mean one thing, or any of two or more different things. Some words have dozens of meanings. Some words are their own antonyms.
If that’s what you’re seeing here, you haven’t read half the thread.
Do you have a lot of people in your life who say, “I promise I will be at your house absolutely no later than 10AM”, and then break that promise? Because, speaking as a chronically late person, I know better than to make that promise.
Naw, I’m relieved if I get there first and have to wait for the other person. Hey! I didn’t make them wait. I’m on time!
That’s a win for me.
Context matters. I’m an actuary. I work with numbers all day. They are literally my bread and butter. And if someone tells me, “that item will cost us $7M”, it means it will cost between $6.5M and $7.5M. And that’s if the cost is knowable. If I tell management, “that will cost $7M”, it means that my best guess, today, based on the data I currently have, is that it will cost around $7M. But we both know that circumstances may change, and next year I may be explaining why I now think that that same number is going to be $5M or $10M.
If you tell me the interview is at 10AM, I assume that I really really need to be there by 10AM. If you tell me “let’s try to get to the party at 8PM”, that probably means we are aiming at a window from 7:50PM - 9PM. Of course, context matters, and it might mean something else.
Who said that all punctual people are punctual in the same way, but the chronically late are each late in a different way?
What is loud and clear is that people who want to be angry at those who are late are not going to be dissuaded by anything whatsoever.
Mainly just contractors, hired workers, and my kids do that.
Then you aren’t going to be late. I keep saying it’s just that easy of a problem to avoid.
Oh, yeah, contractors are routinely late.