You are overgeneralizing it. Are there times when this could be worked with? Sure like getting to a party at 9 or 9 30 or 10 makes no difference. But that is not true for everything. Delta is not going to hold that flight for you. The doctor will cancel your appointment if you are too late. The movie starts after previews at 7:46 sharp. And you criticize our side for expecting everyone to meet our standard to be on-time, but that goes the other way as well. Habitual laters expect everyone else to bend for them and accept their lateness. I said in my OP that I told Mrs Cad that I am not going to drive 30+ over the speed limit because she was running late.
So somebody that is always late and make no effort to change to be on-time when necessary is the true victim? And moreover they are victimized by the person they leave waiting or otherwise inconvenience? This changes everything.
You got it. Expecting someone to do what they say they are going to do is very unfair /s
Oh for pity’s sake. It’s almost as though repeating something a hundred times in different ways still doesn’t get you to understand, because you refuse to.
No more of this for me, thanks.
You’re the one who said you think people who are always late are “oppressed and misjudged.”
And I will point out my youngest does have an honest-to-goodness diagnosed-by-a-psychologist executive dysfunction so bad he qualified for an IEP and needed it. Sure he has issues with money management - but he’s learning. He has an issue with depression and will oversleep - but he going to refill his prescription so that should help. He never equated going to college classes with passing. But he does not have an issue with being late.
Best wishes Saint_Cad
As I said up thread,I have only known two people who were chronically late because they didn’t give a shit about inconveniencing others. One actually airily stated that her lateness was an opportunity for us all to mellow out and go with the flow more. All the others, and I’ve known some spectacular ones, including a lady who was 12 hours late to my daughter’s birthday party sleepover, clearly had some kind of mental impairment. “Clearly” because in other areas of their lives they had similar functional difficulty. I don’t think these people are necessarily misjudged, except by the posters in this thread. But I got a lot of apologies.
People do get tired of apologizing for things that they are ashamed of and can’t seem to change.
But that doesn’t matter to you guys, so I’m out.
It occurs to me that i was once in this situation. Friend A arranged rides for a large number of people to an event. She placed me in the car of friend B, along with passengers 2 and 3. (This is my story, so I’m passenger 1.) So i packed my suitcase, took it to work, and in due time i took the subway to friend B’s house. I arrived at more or less the agreed-upon time, as did passenger 2, with their suitcase. Passenger 3 didn’t. We waited about an hour and a half for him. Just killing time in my friend’s living room. We missed the “leave before traffic” window. I think passenger 3 eventually contacted my friend to give an ETA. I don’t recall passenger 3 being especially apologetic, they just moseyed in when they were ready.
None of us knew passenger 3 super well. The whole thing felt vaguely surreal at the time. But the event lasted a weekend, and we did get there in time for Friday supper. So it wasn’t a disaster.
My conclusion is not that passenger 3 is evil, but that passenger 3 is a hot mess, and i pity them. Oh, and i don’t ever want to carpool with them again.
I can see being frustrated if it’s your spouse, and you are constantly fighting with this. But i guess i just don’t get the anger that oozes from this thread.
Guessing such folks never invite people to their house, never can make an airplane flight or doctor appointment?
It was my girlfriend for like three years and it was horrible. And she would throw a fit on the rare occasions that she was kept waiting. She was a hot mess for a lot of reasons. It took forever to get her the fuck out of my house once we split up.
If it’s a friend, they get maybe two of those and I just don’t go with them to time critical things or rely on them anymore. Don’t like to be ready on time or very close to on time when I am driving an hour to the concert? Drive your fucking self.
Why pity them? They didn’t spend 4.5 hours killing time, you three did. They went through their day, arrived at the appointed place and was whisked off to the event, no muss no fuss.
They’re Timephoid Mary™ the person who makes everyone else waste time doing nothing, but never has to sit around twiddling their thumbs for someone else. Next week they’ll find some other victim, not be especially apologetic to them, and the cycle continues.
Honestly, one of the things that keeps coming up is not so much the fact that someone was made late, but the lack of meaningful apology, and the seeming lack of effort to prevent future lateness.
Because i suspect they do miss flights and doctors appointments, and my life is just generally easier than theirs. I had to live with them one afternoon. They have to live with themselves every day.
My brother HAD a girlfriend. They visited my house. Middle of the mountains in the very high Rockies. I and some others where making breakfast. She knew that, but decided to run into the bathroom to put on makeup for an hour.
This in itself is strange. Makeup? At 11,200 feet in elevation? Just hanging out with a few friends?
Since breakfast was cooked, and needed to be served the rest of us ate as normal people do.
She got mad at us all and started crying because we didn’t either serve her breakfast in the bathroom or wait for her.
She was on a Ground Search and rescue team for heavens sake. Mostly doing ground pounding like my brother and I but she had to have makeup on for breakfast.
But nooooo we where supposed to wait for, or on her. I’m a good host, but really, serve you breakfast in the bathroom?
She needed help I suppose, but I didn’t have Frasier or Niles at my disposal.
People that get mad at you because THEY are late is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Always will be.
This is a failure to understand that different people’s heads work differently.
Sure, there are tools. But using the tools is for some of us distracting, and a major job on its own. Suppose you were driving a car to get from point A to point B, except you had to keep pulling over every few minutes (no matter what the traffic was like, or whether the shoulders were any good), getting out of the car, and checking that the lug nuts were tight. If you know about and have available and can and will use a lug wrench, you’ve still got a problem.
Nope. It’s a reason, not an excuse. You can do that. Because you can do it does not mean that everybody can.
I can’t recognize people. I can usually recognize cats. Most humans can easily recognize other people, but can’t tell apart cats who look clearly different to me. Different people are constructed differently, and there is no amount of telling me that I’m only making excuses that will make me able to recognize faces and no, I can’t learn it, or always fake it using other cues, because unlike cats humans change all those other cues around all the time.
Indeed. It’s an excellent state to be in – and a whole lot of excellent work often gets done in it.
I tend to call it “the weeding trance” because I can often get into it while weeding, or doing similar fieldwork; but can sometimes even reach it doing paperwork, and nearly always if writing something that’s working well. – what? that’s the end of the row? is it half an hour later or three hours? I’ll have no idea.
Weeding in the weeding trance is enjoyable, and a lot gets done. Trying to do any large amount of weeding if I can’t get into the weeding trance is unpleasant, and less will get done. Probably about the same amount of tractor work will get done either way, but I’ll be more tired afterwards if I can’t get into the trance and less able to do something else, and I’m less likely to find that I’ve figured out what to do about that bit of field plan with a bit of my mind that wasn’t either running tractor or worrying about the time. Some kinds of writing won’t get done at all if I’m not in the trance, and others will take considerably longer to accomplish.
And – it feels to me, to a considerable extent, like what I’m here for. Not the only thing I’m here for; but an essential component of my life.
In this functional society. Most societies throughout history and prehistory have functioned without the existence of precise clocks. A number of them manage it now.
And we keep explaining reasons in this thread, to people who seem entirely incapable of understanding the reasons. Maybe their minds are so constructed that they’re unable to believe everyone can’t do what they can do?
Then why post this:
We now hold Thanksgiving on Friday in my family, because my sister’s branch never made it here on Thursday until everybody had given up and filled up on snacks and the turkey was disintegrating. I and people who wanted to know when dinner was got annoyed and bugged them, they got annoyed at being bugged, they got here if anything later because of time spent being bugged about it. One year I finally thought: they stay two days, so on Friday they’re already here. I announced that the main dinner was on Friday and on Thursday whoever was here and hungry would eat when and what we felt like; and for Thursday I made pot roast, which only gets better the longer it sits on low heat. Worked like a charm. – it’s now a family tradition, to the extent that the years Thanksgiving was entirely on Zoom we still held it on Friday. It lets people join in who had their Thursday celebration with somebody else. All win!
This.
I don’t think anybody in this thread has said that there are no people existing who don’t give a shit and who express this, among other ways, by being late.
What we’re objecting to is assuming that this is the motive of all or even most people who are often late. I’m not going to brag about myself; but I have tons of personal evidence that people exist who are chronically late and who spend very large amounts of their time, entirely voluntarily, on helping others.
I’m getting the sense that this may be a lot of what’s going on in this thread – many years of simmering marital hassles, with that anger being generalized and aimed at a lot of other people.
My father did most things Very Fast, unless he was asleep on the couch. My mother did most things Moderately Slow and Steady, though she could move fast in a real emergency. They both got a lot done, though mostly different sorts of things. But going anywhere with both of them at once was a real bear. And it often did seem to me that when they were together my mother moved even slower – and my father even faster.
I can cook dinner just fine. It won’t be ready at any specific moment, and not everything may be ready at once, and not everything may be done to some exact specific degree of doneness. I’m very fussy about ingredients, but not about any of the rest of that. I have a friend who’s very fussy about exactly how done her fish is. When she visits here, if we have fish, she’s the one who cooks it.
And that business about “just do it” is massively dismissive of other people’s lives.
If that’s what you think you’re reading in this thread, I doubt there’s any way whatsoever to explain any of this to you. I probably ought just to quit trying.
I can set up strawmen too Thorny_Locust. I prefer not to.
And I prefer not to be quoted out of context.
OK. Thanks.
Then let’s change it to a polite functional society
And, yes, there are often reasons for any act of inconsideration. But, often they can be reduced, or eliminated via behavioral modification tools if you really want to. And, you should really want to.
I think it’s actually slightly different - I don’t care about people being late until it affects me and I can’t avoid it . If I’m meeting a group of friends at the bar - I don’t care if one is half an hour late. I’m meeting one friend - I will probably care if they are 30 minutes late and if it happens twice, I probably won’t make that sort of plan with that person anymore. Doesn’t mean I’ll cut them out of my life, but maybe I’ll only make group plans with them, so I’m not sitting at the bar alone waiting for them.
The thing is, I can’t always do that. When I was working and people showed up late to training, the trainers invariably waited at least 10 minutes.(because the alternative would be to start over when they got there or reschedule them for another day) And at least one of the latecomers would have coffee in a cup from the coffee shop down the block - meaning that at least part of the reason they were late was that they stopped to get coffee. No way for me to avoid that. And it’s kind of the same thing with family - I would love to avoid making plans with any of my sisters-in-law because none of them are capable of being on time but I can’t really avoid them. If it’s my husband who is always late, I can’t really travel separately from him all the time. I can’t avoid driving my 82 year old mother places, even if she’s never dressed when I get to her house. If my kids were always late when they were actual kids, I couldn’t just leave them home. * And it’s even worse when they can be on time for some things , because that just kind of points out that there is a hierarchy - I’m willing to maybe waste 15 minutes so the shore excursion doesn’t leave without me, but I’m not willing to waste the same 15 minutes so you can both pee and see the start of the movie.
I think to some extent that’s part of what’s being misunderstood - I don’t think anybody is angry about strangers or anyone else being late when it doesn’t affect them. There is perhaps a certain amount of anger about certain statements ( I think there was one argument about what a certain time means ) but I don’t care if your brother or puzzlegal’s brother is three hours ( or three days) late for dinner. It’s none of my business and doesn’t affect me and I won’t even have an opinion about them. I don’t think anyone else cares about strangers being late to things either - I’m absolutely certain that the anger is about specific people and maybe it seems to be generalized but I don’t think that’s intentional.
* Just examples - they aren’t really all late, only my sisters-in-law. My husband used to be late until he got stuck waiting a few times for the SILs and then he realized what he was doing to me.
Thanks, that’s a helpful thing to point out.
Okay, I’ll offer another example when I was annoyed at people being late. I served on a special grand jury for 6 months, which was then extended another few months. We met every Wednesday afternoon. And the prosecutor didn’t start things off until EVERYONE was there. We only needed a quorum, and I can see wanting a few more for matters that stretched over multiple weeks, but he really didn’t need everyone there.
So some people would be late, of course, because that’s how things work. But it was, I don’t remember, maybe 20 people, so the rest of us would sit around. So the next week, more people would be late so as not to sit for so long, and a few of them would misjudge and be even later… after a couple of months we were starting 45 minutes after the appointed time – every damn week.
But I didn’t really blame the people who came late. I blamed the prosecutor. He could jolly well have just started at 15 past each week, and the people who trickled in late would have realized they had missed something, and tried to be a little earlier the next week. If he’d done that, I bet we would have had a quorum by 15 past every single week, and we wouldn’t have all been twiddling our thumbs endlessly.