Hello! Please excuse my long response- this is my first response. I know how frustrating it is when friends are late. PLEASE understand that, for most, is not because “they don’t care”. As a tardiculous offender, I can tell you that it usually has to do with anxiety. You may think “this isn’t a new-we’ve done it many times before” and I agree. There shouldn’t be any anxiety, but there is! ESPECIALLY given this last year’s situation. Before I became a stay at home mom, I worked and different jobs and now see that the bosses I felt comfortable with, I was usually early. Bosses I didn’t get along with, I was usually late and obviously making the situation worse. I have two high school boys. One is always punctual- has his homework done and prepared for the day, unless it’s a social situation, then he’s late. The other has always been anxious, but also very social so when school is the issue, I’ve learned that he probably didn’t do homework, has a test, etc. and will be late! Otherwise, if he knows friends are there early, he will be too. AND ALSO (a tidbit info) he will become physically sick because of the anxiety and can’t function. If your late friend has anxiety issues, please be patient, offer help, maybe tell them a time 15-20 mins earlier than actual time and talk to them - don’t bottle it up and burst one day. My husband has almost divorced me because of it and I work on being on time for him and he has developed patience, knowing and seeing the anxiety developing. And of course once at the activity, I usually relax! It can be the worst feeling - not only is the anxiety causing brain paralysis or physical pain, but also knowing that you’re letting someone down is emotional torture. I hope this helps. Thank you for reading/listening to my perspective. 
I hate being rushed at anything, which is another reason I’m usually early to things. Are you chronic latesters not affected by the annoying feeling of being rushed?
Another reason I’m usually early or on time is because I’m a low activity person. So if I have an event scheduled, I don’t have a problem prioritizing it and putting other things aside. I don’t really care if I don’t get a ton of things done that I might have otherwise. I’ve noticed that some of my chronically tardy friends are high activity people and set out to accomplish a lot during a normal day. It’s a lot easier for time to get away from them than it is for me.
If it’s important enough for them to put in a lot of effort, and suffer significant stress and discomfort, they can. The point is they are not doing it to be rude or because they don’t care about you, but because it is very difficult or uncomfortable not to.
What makes you assume habitually late people are able to be on time when it suits them? We’ve had stories of missed flights and lost jobs in this thread.
My mom is/was always late for everything. It drove us kids and my dad crazy. We’d be late for church, Christmas Eve dinner, dentist and doctor appointments, etc. My dad would make a comment and her stock answer was always, “well you don’t have 4 kids to get ready”. Well, that excuse didn’t cut it when we were all teenagers and she was still late. My husband and I got married in the little church that was a couple of blocks from my parents’ house. My dad, my sisters and I all hopped into the big red station wagon with our dresses, etc. to go to the church. My mom, of course wasn’t ready to leave. We only had one car at the time so she ended up running through the neighborhood carrying her dress. I think back now and laugh but then I also wonder, why didn’t my dad just go back and get her?!!
I think because of hating being late when I was a kid, I have never been late as an adult. I know how long everything takes me when I get ready - makeup, hair, etc. plus travel time. So I always work my way backwards from the time I need to be somewhere and then I know when I have to start getting ready. I have to be to somewhere by 8:00 - 15 minutes travel, 15 minutes for hair, makeup, dressing, teeth, 10 minutes for breakfast, 10 minutes to get the dog out to go potty and back in and then settled with a treat. So if I start my routine by around 7:00, I’ll be early or I’ll have a few extra minutes if something goes awry.
I have been on both sides, the superduperjudgemental you don’t respect me side and the I am so anxious and trying to be on time but I failed again so sorry so so so sorry side.
They are both really shitty.
I have met (after a certain amount of time has gone by while I wait), people who truly do not care how inconvenienced anyone is by their lateness, because they are free spirits etc. and feel that they are setting an example of relaxation about time that I should follow. Those people are infuriating, and their casual lack of responsibility doesn’t limit itself to being on time, either. But in my experience they are quite rare in this culture.
The side I am on now is the side of getting through my life with the least amount of pointless stress. A big stressor is expectations of other people. My goal is to expect little and be happily surprised when people come through anyway.
I advise all the stick up their behinds about punctuality to do the same. Flowers will grow in your path and birds will carol to you in the trees.
This is an excellent post, thank you for sharing it.
Is there a reason to think that chronically late people are any different? i.e. that if they consider it important enough to them they will put in that effort.
What makes you think that people with autism or ADHD are able to concentrate or maintain eye contact when it suits them?
I guess if you miss your doctor’s appointment/restaurant reservation/start of the movie/flight/train/etc. because someone else doesn’t know how time works, it’s all OK and sunny and rainbows and birds chirping in the trees and you just have to say “That appointment didn’t really matter anyway.”
And another question for the latesters: if we agree to meet somewhere between 6 and 6:30 for dinner, do you shoot for getting there at 6 or does your mind settle on 6:30 as the scheduled appointment? If the latter, I suggest that you are shooting yourselves in the foot by immediately eliminating any cushion time caused by interruptions, delays or misjudgments in time.
If someone else habitually isn’t punctual, I don’t bother sitting in judgement on them. I just work around that quality. If someone was always late, I wouldn’t rely on them to drive me to an appointment or a train station. I would go to the movie or the restaurant and if they weren’t there on time I’d go in without them and enjoy myself. The point is, I find other people’s behavior is best treated like weather. It’s not about me, and I can’t control it.
If you want to be unhappy all your life, trying to make other people meet your expectations is an excellent path.
I’ll only say this one more time: most people who are chronically late do not mean to be, and that changing that pattern might require a great deal of upheaval and anxiety that people who have never been chronically late seem to find impossible to understand. One simple fix is rarely going to do it.
Those are the same words I have come to live by and I have become a much less stressed, happier human being.
I don’t. I think they can do it for a limited amount of time/number of occasions by putting in an enormous effort that you don’t have to because it’s easy for you. Think of something that you find really hard and can only succeed in sometimes with enormous effort, and imagine being expected to do that perfectly, all day every day.
I’m trying to understand how their minds work. If a latester’s boss tells them that they can arrive at work any time between eight and nine, do they affix nine as the appointed time in their minds? Does a range of acceptable times default to the latest time in the range for them?
For anything like that I’d never promise what I can’t reasonably guarantee to deliver. That’s where the problem lies but a bit of humility, self-awareness and plain-speaking does wonders for mutual understanding.
Being chronically late is neither here nor there (literally!) but the chronically late must know that they are that way inclined. They also know they exist in a world where reasonable punctuality is expected so committing to a time without clearly stating your likelihood of not keeping to it seems guaranteed to cause unnecessary strife.
This is a pretty jerkish thing to say in MPSIMS. Please play nicely.
What a great first post, CoWinkyDink! Welcome, and thanks for sharing your perspective; it can’t have been easy to jump into the snake pit like that.
To those who are still struggling with this concept: no one is saying you have to be OK with people being late, or that it doesn’t affect you. What we’re saying is that you don’t have to take it personally. You do not have to put up with it; unless the late person is your minor child, you can decide that the pleasure of their company isn’t worth waiting for. But your failure to understand that, just because someone’s behavior makes you feel a certain way, even when you’re totally justified in feeling that way, doesn’t mean that was the person’s intent or reason for behaving that way, is probably going to show up in lots of other places and cause you unnecessary grief.
Or maybe not. Maybe this erroneous belief is serving you in some way. Maybe you’re frustrated that society doesn’t fully share your outrage at the simple fact that some people keep you waiting, or even you, on some level, doubt that the offense itself is quite outrageous enough to justify your outrage. Maybe you find comfort in an explanation that casts them as deliberately causing you this outrage, or at least being recklessly indifferent to it. Maybe it’s easier, or at least seems easier in the short term, to believe you have no choice in how you react to this, and instead to focus all your energy on the thing you can’t control and therefore don’t actually need to do anything about–other people’s behavior.
If that’s the case, have at it, I guess. Just don’t expect the rest of us to play along.
Well said. Thank you for putting this very important perspective forward. I think it affects a lot of people. It would be great if many more people understood it.
I am a latester. I don’t have a good sense of time, and I can arrive a bit late, or I can arrive early, but it’s pretty rare for me to do “right on time”.
When I had a job where acceptable starting times were anything between 7 and 9, I aimed for 8:10, and pretty much always made it in by 8:20. But I tried to avoid scheduling meetings before 9.
My husband gets annoyed when it’s his night to cook and I’m late for supper, so I usually come to the table 5-10 minutes early. One night, both I and my daughter were 15 minutes early, and he asked us if we knew what time it had been when he told us when supper would be ready, and how much time had passed. And we both said, “nope”.
Not especially. What I really hate is “hurry up and wait”. Being rushed feels like I’m accomplishing something. I mean, there are limits, of course. But given a choice of “running through the airport to catch my plane” or “waiting an hour in the airport” I would rather run, honestly.
(the only time I’ve actually missed a flight, it was because the connecting flight was late. But I suppose I could have picked a connecting flight with a larger margin for error.)
That rings true. I am a high-activity person.
This astonishes me, and I am in awe. No, I don’t know how long it takes to do my hair. Can I find the hairclip I want? No, my pets don’t keep a strict schedule. I was late yesterday because I suddenly realized it was 90F out, and I wanted to put on a headband to keep sweat out of my eyes, and couldn’t frigging find any of my headbands. Of course I saw one of them as soon as I got home. I was 6 minutes late picking up my friend, and we were 1 minute late to the event we went to. (we’d planned to be a couple minutes early.) I texted my friend to let him know I’d be late. Lots of other people arrived at the event later than we did, and that turned out to be no problem at all.
I had a chronically late girl friend and it was a nightmare. In the end it has to be a compromise but she, like most chronically late people in my experience, are way too selfish to even compromise. I feel like I am reasonable.
The farmer’s market runs from 9am to noon. We plan to get there at 10:00. If we get there at 10:20 instead, no big deal. If we get there at 11:45 when a lot of the stuff is gone and people are getting ready to break down and we have to run through the whole thing, the experience is ruined. And that was nearly every fucking week until I just stopped going to farmer’s market.
If we were doing one of her things and I didn’t care much about it, she could be as late as she wanted it. If it was something important to me and she made me miss part of it, it’s completely unacceptable. For example, she chose almost all of the movies that we went to see in the theater. Literally twice a year there would be a movie that I really wanted to see and she couldn’t be on time for me. My solution was to just see my movies when the DVD came out.
We had very expensive concert tickets one time for a show that we both wanted to see. Joe Cocker opening for Van Morrison. I had seen Van a few times but never saw Joe and I really really wanted to see him. She didn’t work that day. Literally the only thing that she had to do that day was be ready at 6. I got home from work early at 4. She was still in her bathrobe fucking around on the internet. She insisted on doing her workout that she could have done earlier or skipped that day. She insisted that it would take 30 minutes. I watched her work out I don’t know how many times and between the routine and the shower it never took less than an hour. And there was some bullshit about getting food too because getting something at the venue wasn’t good enough. So we were massively late and had to park over a mile away and we missed Joe Cocker’s set and now he’s dead.
Casual plans are one thing. Things with a definite starting time or where there is some kind of time crunch are something else. (And of course unexpected things like car accidents occasionally happen.) People who can’t tell the difference and act accordingly should never, ever get their way.