Why are you always late?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

Ah yes. ‘I’m willing to compromise, as long as you acknowledge that I’m entirely right and you’re entirely wrong.’

True. What about the person who spends a few hundred buying the kids an on-sale swing set on impulse, when there’s still plenty of money left over for the rent; versus the one who wants to spend three months studying the issue, by which time the sale and the summer are both over?

Those two need to sit down together and a) determine an amount of money over which either’s supposed to consult with the other before spending b) figure out some sort of guidelines as to how long is reasonable to spend consulting for approximately how much expenditure. And, probably, discuss how important it is that their kids get a swingset. If either one keeps insisting that it’s entirely the other one causing all the friction, it’s not going to help.

But the person who expects everybody else to always show up within a specified five-minute interval is annoying those who don’t work that way. If circumstances genuinely require showing up in that fashion, they’re justified. But if not, why is the person who wants exact timekeeping the only one whose annoyance matters?

Depends. Did they say ‘we really want you to be here by 10!’ or did @Little_Nemo suggest 10 and not discuss whether they needed to be ready by then? Is Little_Nemo going to hang around at the mall with them until time to head home, and is just as happy to hang around at the brother’s? Does Little_Nemo need or strongly want to be someplace else entirely by 11? And if Little_Nemo, who’s the one actually doing the driving, doesn’t care, why does the brother, and why do you?

That’s my problem, not theirs. If I knew clearly when the thing was going to start, I can either go to the extra lengths necessary for me to make sure I get there on time, or I can take my chances on whether I’ll miss part of the event or even not be able to get in. Or, of course, I can say ‘no thanks’ and not show up at all.

When it’s appropriate, I’ve sometimes set up backup plans – ‘Sister, what do you want me to do if I get there (a five hour drive) after you leave for X? Can we set up a way for me to get into your house, or do you want to give me directions for how to get to X on my own (if it’s something I can sneak in late to)?’

(Accommodations in my family go both ways. I host Thanksgiving; and we now have Thanksgiving dinner on Friday. They come here, arriving on the Thursday, and stay for a couple of days; and after several years in which they couldn’t manage to get here anywhere near on time for the traditional Thursday dinner, I finally got my brain functioning on the subject and said we’d have Thanksgiving on Friday, and a much more casual whenever-people-get-here-and-eat-first-if-you-get-too-hungry meal Thursday evening. Works fine.)

82

Only one of them is the one that is causing them to miss dinners, flights, games, social events.

Unless it is one that wants to buy a swingset, when they are already behind on the rent. Then it is that person that is causing the friction.

You are either on time, or you are not. There is no actual compromise to that fact.

Now, you could sit down with the other person, and discuss what you are willing to miss out on because you cannot be on time for events that happen at a certain time, how much you want to put your friends and family out due to not following through on your commitments. If you want a compromise like, “Okay, for social events, we may lose some friends, but we will follow your time, and show up when we show up. But for important things, like doctor visits, weddings, funerals, and dog grooming, we will be there at the time we said we would be there.”

But if one person wants to be on time to appointments, and the other wants to be an hour late, compromising on a half hour is not a compromise, it is a capitulation.

It’s not about a “five-minute” interval. If someone is five minutes late to a social function, no one much cares. It’s when they are half hour, and hour, or five hours late that it’s putting other people out.

If 9 people are there within 15 minutes of the agreed upon time, and the tenth makes the rest wait another hour, it is that tenth person that is in the wrong.

Many times they do. They have dinner reservations, they have movie tickets, they have plane tickets. Like it or not, most of the world operates on a time table.

It’s usually not just one person, and it’s usually not “exact timekeeping”. Like I said, 5 minutes is generally acceptably late in most circumstances, even 15 for most things. So by showing up an hour late, you are annoying several people. You are putting your own needs above those of others.

I believe that the post said, as an example, that they would be there to pick them up at 10. I would say that if that didn’t work for them, they could ask them to show up later.

I don’t know if he’s going to hang out there, but as he said it was an hour drive to the mall, I would think that he probably wouldn’t be hangining out at the brother’s.

Depends on the situation. Maybe he does. Is it on him to explain to his nieces that he has somewhere to be after he drops them off? Does he have to justify his itinerary if he is doing a favor?

I don’t think that you read that quite well. It is when the brother is the one that was there to pick them up and they were wasting his time that he would get annoyed.

And why do I care? That’s a presumptuous question that I do. It was used as an example, and I was responding the the example.

That’s probably for the best. Don’t make commitments that you know you cannot follow through on.

83

the joke in my family is I was born 2 months early and therefore was late on almost everything else for the rest of my life …

I’m late for various reasons usually being :
1 I’m physically disabled and even though I can walk I can’t do it fast and can’t drive…
2 I’m told I have no sense of time and easily distracted …
3 I’m actually concentrating on something and the rest of the world disappeared (especially when reading or playing a video game…)
4 I’m disorganized, so on the day I have to be early, I’ve lost my shoes and forgot who is taking me somewhere and I’ve no clue how to get there, etc …
5 I don’t really care about going there in the first place

and its usually one or more of the above reasons at the same time so people have just accepted such things because it’s me just being me

How ever I do show up on time or early just enough as to not get killed by relatives tho

84

I found that a having a baby increased the variance around arrival time, but didn’t change the mean. It can take 5-30 minutes to get a baby ready for travel, so I’d give us an extra 20 minutes to get where we were going. Sometimes everything was smooth, and we were way to early. Other times it ended up taking 45 minutes to get the baby ready, and we were way too late.

Generally people were forgiving, because “sorry we’re late, it involves poop” is an understandable excuse for anybody who has experience with babies.

85

Agreed. ‘Sorry it involves barf or poop’ covers a multitude of occasions with babies.

86

My wife and I go to church separately. Oh, no, same church… but I would get so impatient waiting for her and knowing we’re now going to be really late, like walking in during the sermon late, with everyone looking at us.

So I started taking my bike.

Works great, I’ll yell upstairs and say “See you there!” and she’ll yell from the middle of her ablutions “I’m almost ready!” and I’ll mutter “You should always start the Sabbath with a really juicy lie…”

I save her a seat, she breezes in whenever, low blood pressures all around (Finally! Being angry at your spouse in church just feels so wrong…).

87

As someone who works in project management, I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to get people to do things they may not want to do on time.

For a lot of people, their schedules are dictated by other stakeholders who often have no concept for how long things take or what needs to be done. Often because they have no visibility into other people’s schedule or the work they are actually doing. Quite frequently meetings or activities are booked back to back with no slack so that 5 minutes over runs into the next meeting which runs 10 minutes over when pushes into the next one and so on.

For personal appointments, often it’s simply a matter of flakiness or maybe even some form of OCD. Like the wife who has to look “perfect” before meeting your friends for dinner or that friend who just sort of "la la la la la"s through life marching to their own drum.

88

So does she still arrive late, with all the attendant looks at her from the congregation? :slight_smile:

89

I used to be like my parents, always 15-30 minutes early for everything. I’m not sure what happened but on-time or late is me these days. Especially, right now, post-Covid as absolutely everyone is getting in their cars and going somewhere. Last year, the roads were empty. Now, I need to plan for traffic. I’m going to really hate going into the office instead of working from home in a couple of months.

90

FWIW, a few weeks ago I was conversing with a co-worker who said when he lived just 2 or 3 miles from work, that’s when he would often be late because he often underestimated the travel time. When he moved 20-somewhat miles away ( his present location ) that problem went away.

91

I don’t feel that this is always the case.

Let’s say a couple is planning out their day’s schedule and one of them says “We need to go to the supermarket today. We can do it this afternoon after we get these other things done.” And the other person says “Alright. We will leave at two thirty.”

The first person gets distracted by other things and isn’t ready to leave until a quarter past three. The second person is seething because they are leaving forty-five minutes late.

Who caused the issue here? The person who wasn’t ready until 3:15? Or the person who arbitrarily decided that 2:30 was the right time to go to the supermarket and any time later than that was wrong?

Sometimes problems are caused by people being late. But sometimes a problem is caused just because somebody has decided that they are late even though the schedule was meaningless.

I didn’t feel disrespected. If I had something else to do at ten o’clock, I would have told my nieces I couldn’t drive them to the mall then. I had already decided my schedule was free at ten for their use. It didn’t matter to me when we actually left for the mall.

It would have been an arbitrary standard for me to have decided that driving to the mall at ten was fine but driving to the mall at eleven was wrong and I was being disrespected by it.

As I’ve said, there are certainly times when a particular schedule has meaning and it’s important to follow it. But some people go beyond this; to them every schedule is important and it needs to be followed just because it’s the schedule. These are the people for whom punctuality can be the problem.

92

Sorry, I meant to post in this thread before the phone battery died, bu

93

Relativity. I get going so fast that time slows down for me, but continues as normal for your typical Earth-bound observer. By the time I have cause to realize something is amiss and slow down a bit, it’s already past time. In my haste, I am undone.

94

You know when you promise somebody something you should be expected to follow through.

So you’re saying if I promise you that I will pick you up at 7:30pm for practice and that EVERYTIME I am 10 to 15 minutes late and that makes us both late that YOU are the unreasonable time for expecting me to show up on time and not inconvenence you?

And the issue is people don’t want to be punctual. But why? Why is it accepted for students to wander 10 minutes late to class or employees to show up late? Why is it ok that you make the effort to be ready on time and have to wait for someone to show up whenever?

I know you want to paint me as the ahole here, but you are wrong. The ahole is the one that promises you that you will be leaving at a certain time, gives you shit that you question them about the time to be ready to go, leaves you waiting while you’re ready on time, then gives YOU shit about being late - drive faster, go around that car, we can’t stop for gas (even though you told them 2 hours before you left that you had to leave time for gas) because we’re late. Or missing the first 5 minutes of the movie, they don’t care but you do so F YOU for wanting to see the start of the movie.

95

Response #95 is late?

96

That is the crazy part for me.
It has never been a 20 minute drive. We make that trip every week and at best it has been 30 minutes with no traffic, all green lights and a tailwind so why do you think it is 20 minutes?

You got up 20 minutes late and we have to leave in 15 minutes. You spent 40 minutes in the bathroom playing on your phone and are now jumping in the shower. You do this every time. Have you not learned how time works?

I really don’t understand how people don’t learn from experience in this. It’s simple math right? 30 + 20 > 15 right? Every time right? So doing something for 30 minutes then another for 20 minutes take longer than 15 minutes right?

97

What if those are the same person?

98

The person that didn’t follow through on what they said they would do.

If they didn’t think that they would be ready by 2:30, they could say so. If at 2:00, they realize that it’s going to take another hour to finish what they are doing, they can give a heads up.

But, if 2:30 comes and goes, and then 2:45, 3:00, and finally 3:15, all the while the second person is ready and waiting, then that is disrespecting that person and their time.

Does it matter when they get there? Probably not. Does it matter that one person wasted their time just waiting on the other? Well, it may or may not to the person that was kept waiting, but it definitely did not to the person who made them wait.

You didn’t. Your brother did. That just means that you are more tolerant to people wasting your time.

And what were you doing with that wasted time? Were you chatting and catching up with your family, something that you would be happy to do anyway? If you’ve cleared your schedule for the day, and really have nothing you’d rather do than hang with whatever family is around, then they aren’t really keeping you waiting in the first place.

If you were just going to drop them off, and then go do other things that you need or want to take care of, then you may not be as appreciative of having that time taken from you.

It’s not an arbitrary standard that keeping someone waiting is rude. If everyone knows that you showing up at 10 means spending an hour socializing together, that’s not keeping anyone waiting. Maybe your brother didn’t find that socializing to be as enjoyable as you do, and that’s why he was more sensitive to the waste of his time.

Let’s say rather than being at your brother’s, they are asking for a ride home from the mall. You agree that you will pick them up at 6 PM. Will you feel an obligation to be on time? Will you expect them to?

I think that there is simply a difference of opinion of when schedules are important and have meaning. I put that meaning at when you will make someone wait on you. Your example of the couple going shopping doesn’t come from the perspective of the person kept waiting, it comes from the perspective of the person who makes others wait. In your example of your nieces, it was obvious to everyone that you were not really being kept in wait.

There is nothing wrong with not committing to a time. My parents sometimes want me to come over to visit, whether for an event of just to see each other. I say I will come by after work, and I’ll give a loose estimate of when that would be, usually in the 6PM arena, but point out that there are factors outside of my control that could alter that. My father once tried to push the point, and wanted me to commit to a time, so I said, “9:30 PM”. He thought that was ridiculous, I said that it would probably be much earlier, but that was the earliest that I could commit to.

So, to sum up, if you can’t commit to a time, then don’t. No one will be offended if you can’t, they will only be offended if you say you will and don’t follow through on what you said you would do.

Do you feel that appointments are schedules to be followed? Would you show up late to work or to your dog groomer?

ETA: in the hours between starting and ending this post I was talking to a friend, and the subject of people being late came up. We agreed that being kidnapped by pirates is a reasonable excuse, but you should still call.

99

Personally? No. I’m generally known as the guy who shows up early. When it comes to picking sides, I am definitely on Team Punctual.

But I can understand the viewpoint of a person who is casual about punctuality, which is what the original question was. And the answer is not that these people are evil and enjoy making good people like us suffer.

100

Would you be at all annoyed at having to wait for your nieces when you told them that you would pick them up from the mall at 6, and they don’t come out till 7?

The question was, “why are people late?” not “why are they casual about punctuality?”

The OP wasn’t specific, but it didn’t sound like it was just for social shindigs where punctuality means very little, but also for things that matter, things where people make you wait.

I didn’t say that, what I said is that being late is being indifferent to the effect that their lateness has on others. That’s not being respectful to them or their time. Nothing about being evil or about their intentions.

If you are casual about punctuality, don’t make commitments that you can’t keep. At the very least explain what factors could make you miss a commitment that you would like to keep. If you don’t think that you will be able to meet a commitment, let people know as soon as you do, don’t just leaving them waiting.