As a guy, I find that kind of insulting. Make that very insulting.
And in my house, it’s not true at all.
Coming back to this:
For one thing, I’ve given more than one reason in this thread why people are late; and the primary reason I gave as to why I in particular am late is a brain function issue. But it’s not the one you’re describing; and I’m not sure that any poster in this thread has described themselves as waiting until it’s 5 minutes before it’s time to leave to start doing four or five different things; though some people complaining about others being late are describing those others as doing that or something like it.
ETA: Some people certainly lead more complicated lives than others. I don’t know that that’s gender related; though I think that in this culture for families with a male and a female adult it is on average more likely to be the woman who’s expected to deal with those things most likely to throw a sudden complication in the works.
“So we agree to be there at ten?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll tell you right now I’m very punctual. So I’ll probably be there fifteen minutes before ten.”
“And I’ll tell you right now I’m not very punctual. So I’ll probably be there fifteen minutes after ten.”
“That’s totally disrespectful and selfish. You’re just going to make me wait for fifteen minutes.”
“You just told me you were planning on waiting for fifteen minutes anyway. So I figured waiting didn’t bother you.”
Complete mischaracterization (again) of our side. If you said you’d be there at 10:15 that would be OK.
One more time - if you commit to 10am then show up 15 minutes late then that’s the issue. Here is the real-life scenario
“Pick you up at 10am? I’ll be there."
You show up at fifteen minutes after ten with no notice.
“That totally disrespectful and selfish. You’re just made me wait for fifteen minutes.”
You seem like a person with a lot of excuses. Let me state for the record that you are unequivocally never invited to anything I’m planning. 
You missed the punchline.
The not very punctual person has outed themselves as a liar who has no intention to uphold the agreement he just made.
And, as noted to you before, there is a difference between sacrificing time in order to uphold an agreement and sacrificing time because someone else didn’t.
@thorny_locust I appreciate your position. If I asked a friend to meet up for lunch because I’m ‘in town that day’ and he told me about his crippling anxiety over scheduling, and that’s why he can’t commit to a time, I would be willing to work with him. People who are late do not have those conversations, they agree to meet at 10, show up sometime well after 10 and place the burden of their temporal problems on others, without their knowledge or agreement.
You are missing that to some people, “10” means “no later than 10:01” and to others, it means “between 9:45 and 10:15”.
I just told you that in my professional career, for which I’m paid a lot of money, “$7M” usually means “between $6.5M and $7.5M” and other times means “my best guess is between $6.5M and $7.5M, but next year i may tell you anything from $5M and $10M, when i have more information”
The same words mean different things to different people in different contexts.
If you are a punctual person and will be bothered if your friend rolls in at 10:15, let them know that. The two of you can probably come up with a mutually agreeable plan, or you may decide it’s not worth trying to get together. But you won’t end up standing on the curb, fuming.
Chronically late people don’t show up at 9:45 for a 10:00 meet up. That’s what it means to be chronically late, if they were just as likely to be early as late, we would have a different name for it.
Speaking as a chronically late person, if I’m going to something where I HAVE to be on time, either because they won’t let me in, later, or because the person I’m meeting cares a GREAT DEAL, I am a lot more likely to show up at 9:45 than at 10.
I can do early or late. I can’t do on time.
As discussed, other chronically late people have other issues. But to just assume that everyone you interact with thinks that “10” means “not later than 10:01” is just setting yourself up to be angry when completely decent, well-meaning people “lie” to you.
I don’t know of anyone who shows up precisely at 10 am - pretty much everybody is either early or late by at least a couple of minutes. I remember once being in a conversation with someone who was surprised at the number of people where he worked who showed up right on time. It had never occurred to him that they weren’t exactly on time everyday - they varied their routine depending on circumstances . If they had good traffic and got to work early, they sat in the car listening to the radio. If they were running later than expected, they skipped picking up coffee. I’m not saying I expect people to skip coffee rather than be a minute late to work -however , if spending 10 minutes picking up breakfast is going to make you 10 minutes late for a meeting , maybe you should skip it that day.
A fair amount of the dislike of lateness is due to two issues. One is a perception that people who are always late don’t have any consideration for other people’s time - and that perception is reinforced by people who get somewhere late because they are unwilling to change their routine at all. They get to the meeting 20 minutes late because they stopped to pick up coffee even though they are already 5 minutes late or pick up their kids from school late because they leave when a particular TV show has ended , even though leaving at that time doesn’t leave them any buffer for getting stuck behind a garbage truck. The other reason is because anxiety happens on both ends - I don’t get anxious about someone being late when we’re leaving for a road trip or to meet a group hanging out at a bar. But if their lateness eats into my “get to the airport” buffer, and we end up leaving for the 20 minute ride to the airport exactly 20 minutes before we need to be there, my anxiety is going to make me feel nauseous. I probably started feeling anxious the night before, but that’s not anybody’s fault- the half-hour I spent waiting for someone is another story.
Lateness is lateness, of course. But the thinking process behind being late is all over the place.
For some people who are chronically late, it’s a power play. You see this in office situations - some people have to be the last one to arrive at meetings. You’ll see it outside of the work environment, too. For some people, there’s a need to demonstrate that they are important enough to make everyone wait for them (and it probably spills over into areas beyond punctuality). This is incredibly annoying to me. I know people like this, both at work and in my personal life. In my personal life, eventually they get dropped out of a lot of stuff, because I really can’t deal with that crap (hi, Sally!).
There are some people who simply do not have a sense of time. I believe this is true – it’s just like someone not being able to hear or smell. Their brains just don’t register the passage of time the way most brains do. For these people, I’m not sure that the problem can be solved. They are genuinely disabled.
There are some people who are just incredibly disorganized. They can be helped. Or they can learn on their own to get better..
And then there’s the flip side of the coin. There are people who are way too sensitive to the lateness of others. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter. If a group of friends decides to hang out at the local bar one night, and agree to get there at 10:00 pm, who cares if someone arrives at 10:30? But there’s always someone in the group who will get bent out of shape. Obviously, if the same group plans to see a movie together, it matters. But even then, it’s the person who’s late who suffers.
And there are people who do the opposite – who are never, ever late. Ever. Even when it doesn’t matter. Which can be pretty annoying, too. I know what I’m talking about – I’m one of those people. And I freely admit that I’m just as neurotic about punctuality as the people who are always lete.
Here’s another goodie 
That might be the one I was originally thinking of, but it didn’t turn up when I searched.
Better late than never! 
Well, I’m glad you posted it. I’ve been enjoying procrastinating over there!
Thanks for this. I hope the OP and others read this so they can understand that not all of us chronically late people are assholes, we’re just insane 
Ms. P is in the “difficulty making transitions” category. She’s late for work, but leaves even later. My experience with teachers is that they as a group have a hard time with transitions. Faculty meeting before school? Doesn’t matter if kids have been lined up outside the classroom for a while. Librarian, art teacher, music teacher, ect. bring kids back to classroom after meeting is supposed to be over? We may have to wait 10 minutes. Fortunately, we have a fairly prompt group of teacher this year (well, last year we did; not many have been in person this year).
[giggles at the previous sequence]
Sure we do. You just don’t notice when we got there early, either because we waited outside or because you think of that as normal.
And for a lot of social situations, “10:00” doesn’t mean, culturally, “between 9:45 and 10:15.” It means something more like “between 10:10 and 10:40.” I grew up in a culture in which “come to dinner at 6” meant “get there sometime between 6:15 and 7:00, we’ll probably sit down to dinner somewhere around 7:30 more or less and everybody’s having canapés and drinks and conversation in the living room in the meantime.” I was pretty taken aback the first time I gave a party and somebody showed up right on the dot; I was used to that being considered mildly rude.
That was fun.
And a lot of it does hit home. Yesterday I was reading through it laughing at the “not This minute, the next minute” stretch when I suddenly said “Yes, this minute” out loud, put the computer to sleep, and headed out to harvest the asparagus, water the greenhouse, take in the laundry, and get on the tractor to spade the field to plant the solanacea in.
But – what was that bit about every late person is late in their own way? – that’s not what being late for things generally looks like with me; unless it’s late for something like going to do the errands before one of the stores closes. That’s just what procrastination looks like; and, for specific-time stuff, it isn’t really what’s the problem. For something scheduled for a set time, I’m probably running around in circles at high speed for the hour or so before leaving. What goes wrong is that I did indeed do all that working out of when I need to leave by; but, unless I spend most of the day doing nothing but looking at the clock, somewhere in the course of the day I do look at the clock and it’s half an hour, or an hour, or two hours later than I thought it was; and I’m in the middle of something that can’t be stopped in an instant without causing serious problems. Or, sometimes if less often, it’s that much earlier; but the punctual people don’t want you showing up two hours early, either.
I never schedule things in the early morning. I have incredible difficulty waking up and getting moving. I have slept through alarms going off four inches from my ear for 35 minutes. Yes, I’ve seen a doctor. Yes, I’m being treated. But it still happens from time to time.
Even if I wake up on time, with my clothes picked out for work and my lunch packed, gas in the car, and the coffee set to brew, it’s almost guaranteed that there will be a puddle of cat yak to clean up or someone’s blocking the driveway or my battery dies or a really long train has me stopped for ten minutes. Things just seem to happen at a rate I can’t control.
I caught some grief a few years ago when I couldn’t just hop in a car and get to my mother’s side when she fell. I had to point out to my aunts and cousins that they all had another adult or two who could feed the cats and clean their boxes. Someone else who could wash their clothes and get gas and air for the car while you fix up with work to be gone for a few days. When you live alone, everything that gets done is going to get done by you and by you alone. That takes more time than people realize.
So like Thorny Locust, I do my dead level best not to be in social situations where I MUST be somewhere at a certain time. If it’s an appointment for a dentist or doctor, I try to make them in the afternoon, but even then I seldom make it less than five minutes late. It always takes longer than I think and I feel guilty about leaving work too early.