Help me understand people who are consistently late

[Namechangemum100]

I'm.meeting a friend today, I have deliberately told her the meet time is 30 minutes earlier than it should be as I know for sure she will be late, she always is.

I am one of those people who is always on time, I get ridiculous anxiety if I'm running late and it's just the way I am, but I find myself constantly waiting around for other people, and I just don't understand it.

If you are the type of person who is always late (15 minutes plus and excluding unavoidable traffic etc ), whats your reasoning? I have some friends who will actually say "oh I'll be late to xyz, you know me"...what does this mean?! How?! You know the time of meeting, why is it so hard? Some people will actually let me know they are "running late" at the actual meet time...how did you not forsee this situation 10-15 minutes ago and give a heads up?!

I'm not trying to be goady, if I understand the reasons why I think I might find it less frustrating.

To take this off on an entirely unrelated tangent, what is Woodcraft folk? Sounds intriguing

@Porkflute now you have it

Dailyshite, I enjoy your optimism but that’s not going to work and I know because I am 37 and have done that repeatedly. If DM is only an hour late, she considers that to actually be on time so if you aren’t there because you’d decided to not swallow the lie about what time you were meeting and actually gone off to do your own thing, you’ll be berated for a week about letting her down. This is why I find it difficult to accept that so many people are late because they are making frantic drives across the country to s&even departments after stumbling across someone in need or because they found a bag full of kittens on the road side.

5 or 10 minutes as I say, is fine. But I know a lot of 1hour+ people.

If someone is late to meet me because they took a neighbour to A&E, then rescued an abandoned kitten, then stopped to call the emergency services when they were the first to come across a cyclist knocked off their bike, then of course I wouldn't be upset. Although I'd be hmm at all those things magically happening to one person inside a couple of hours.
Reading this thread,its like we are surrounded by superheroes.Is that the real reason,you are Superman,Batman.

That makes sense now.You are all off saving the world,while we a re sat in a coffee shop waiting for you.

Because they are making everything about them, with no consideration that people might have other stuff going on.

And the person who is running late is making it all about them and the person left waiting might have other stuff going on too.

Drove me mad when we'd have children's parties and one parent was 30 mins - an hour late picking their child up.

I was left hanging around in the car park waiting. Two years running this happened. Never invited the child again.

I once had a parent pick up a child TWO HOURS late from a party. Fortunately it was at my house but I was really anxious about what had happened to them and the child was getting worried too.

Eventually they rocked up with a vague “ oh we went shopping in town and got held up “. No reason as to why they hadn’t texted or phoned or replied to my messages.

Now I realise that they were probably rescuing puppies from burning buildings and were just too modest to say.

Funny how people can adjust things accordingly when there are consequences to them being late...yet none when they're 'just' letting people sit there for ages. Those that are often 30 minutes late for things, are you always 30 minutes late to pick your children up from school? I doubt it.

Another with 4 children that's never late for school (all 3 schools) In fact, the more children I have the better we do for time in the mornings because it has to run like a military operation!

Exactly @0rlaith.

Lateness is bad enough when it's just a casual meet up in a coffee shop where the waiting friend could leave if they wanted to. But people being late to pick up their children, late for dr or hospital appointments or cause friends to miss plays or concerts - that is being self absorbed and self important. They are believing themselves and what they are doing to be more important.

But those that are punctual are just too rigid!

I guess we will all have to agree to differ but I strongly object to being referred to as "rigid" because I get to places on time which (notwithstanding saving small communities en route) is actually the right thing to aspire to.

Being on time is not a flaw!

Agree, how ridiculous. 'Look at that bitch, always on time, who foes she think she is' ....''how dare she never let me down and leave me waiting half an hour when I've things to do".

News flash, just because people are early doesn't mean we don't have other shit going on too!

Because they are making everything about them, with no consideration that people might have other stuff going on.

You have to laugh at the total lack of self awareness going on with this gem of a line.

I love the assumption that the person doing the waiting is time rich with nothing else productive they could doing with their day.

^ This.

I have come very close to losing friendships over this. We can all be late sometimes, stuff happens. But people who, again and again, turn up ages after the agreed time with a flurry of apologies are seriously irritating. They leave people standing around waiting for them, or hanging around at home with their entire afternoon being messed around and don't seem to see anything wrong with that. I have one friend and it's always the same excuse: "oh we got held up/delayed/" every-single-time.

I genuinely despair at the inability to grasp nuance here. I didn't call anyone rigid because they like things to be on time. I said some of my friends are rigid and routine based and meet ups are often arranged around their preferences, to my cost. It's not always that easy just to "build in more time" if they've only got a window of an hour between breakfast and their DC nap time and that means I have to dash across London to their neighbourhood straight from the school run but I do it anyway because meh they are my friends.

I also didn't say I'm always saving kittens. I said I can be optimistic about timings and over-commit. This means that if someone says "can you do X?' and it eats into the contingency I have left myself but, given a fair wind I can still do it, I will. So yes, I can then find myself in a flap if I can't find my purse because I haven't prioritised this particular meet up over everything else and allowed sufficient contingency for things going wrong, but it's not that I am overall only thinking about me and I think my actual friends know this about me. Sometimes this optimism will be over something less noble, and then I hold my hands up and say I'm sorry, I'm not perfect, I'll try harder, but actually most people I meet up with are kind of similar and do the same to me sometimes and we rub along just fine with a bit of mutual understanding, in the same way my more rigid friends and I do when I laugh at their inability to venture out of their postcode or get on a train and they laugh at my inability to manage to find the pub we have been to a dozen times before. A bit of tolerance helps everyone.

And I confess I'm sometimes more than 5-10 mins late. Sometimes more like 20-30. But it's still for the above reasons.

And that's because the journey times involved are large and unpredictable. I'm not 20-30 mins late for things that are walking distance.

"A bit of tolerance helps everyone"

That's fine for someone who's occasionally late. But someone who is always significantly late for things has used up all their tolerance quota.

Lurker would you expect your child’s school to be tolerant of persistent lateness or people who were picking up your slack at work while you are rescuing kittens and running round doing errands?

The thing about tolerance is that the tolerance habitual latecomers expect from their friends doesn't always go both ways.

If you and the person you are meeting are both chronically tardy and can be mutually tolerant of each other then fine. Although the chances of you both actually showing up seem so low that you'd be better off just conducting your entire friendship via WhatsApp.

But when you are habitually late and you expect tolerance from your more punctual friends and family, it's only going one way. You can't say they should tolerate your lateness because you tolerate their punctuality. That doesn't work because their punctuality doesn't have a negative impact in you. (Making you feel bad for being on late doesn't count. That's your bad behaviour making you feel bad, not their good behaviour.) So what are you giving them back in return for their tolerance?

Say you are late and so the two of you miss the start of a film, or aren't let into the theatre to see the show you've got tickets for, or you miss a plane. Even if you pay them back which I bet most of you don't they have still missed the thing they wanted to do.

Even if you agree to pay for coffee or dinner to say sorry for being late, they have still sat there like a lemon waiting for you, they have still been hungry, bored or embarrassed, and they have still had less time in their day to do all the other things they need to be doing, or to see other friends who treat them with more respect.

It’s bad enough being persistently late but trying to shift the blame to the person who is on time is so lacking in self awareness it’s almost amusing.

As I mentioned upthread, my mum is always late. When I was a child, I was late to school nearly every day and so was my best friend who we were supposed to give a lift to. My best friend hated being late and getting into trouble, to the point where all the girls in our friendship group ganged up on me one day and said, "Ethel, it's not fair that you make Jenny late every day." I was 7.

After a while Jenny told her mum she didn't want to come to school with us anymore and they made alternative lift sharing arrangements with another girl, who eventually became Jenny's new best friend (still is).

So I lost my best friend as a direct result of my mum's chronic lateness.

And I was always left hanging around outside the school gates for at least 45 minutes after the end of the day because my mum could not get her arse in gear to come and pick me up on time. I missed out on other stuff due to that as well. When your friend's mum invites you round at 3:30 but your mum isn't there yet and you don't have a mobile phone because it's 1994, your friend and her mum go home and the opportunity is lost.

I'm not going to go no contact with my mum over the fact that she makes me late, especially since it's rarely an issue now I am an adult, but I do still feel resentful that her utter selfishness and inability to be on time had a genuinely negative effect on my childhood.

And I confess I'm sometimes more than 5-10 mins late. Sometimes more like 20-30. But it's still for the above reasons.

And that's because the journey times involved are large and unpredictable. I'm not 20-30 mins late for things that are walking distance.

See when I have to factor in tube journeys I leave a lot of extra time but that does mean saying no to other things that will eat into that contingency.

I have to go to a hospital in London once a week. Takes about an hour and a quarter but I always allow 2 hours in case of delays. Usually I'm really early but a couple of times I've only just made it.

Why can't you work backwards when you are planning when to leave plus some contingency? So appointment at 4, takes 2 hours to get there, allow half an hour for delays means that you have to leave by 1.30. If it takes 2 hours to get ready you need to start at about 11. This gives some leeway but also a timetable to go by rather than letting time just run away with you.

Honestly it doesn't matter how well or how long you've know somebody.
You simply cannot know that they don't have time blindness due to sn asd adhd etc, because some of these people may not even realise themselves.
Not everyone seeks a diagnosis and genuinely live their lives not knowing why they can't just get their shit together.

Work benefits from my tendency to over-commit too actually, as someone mentioned above it leads to greater productivity overall and I put myself out for colleagues. My managers do recognise this, yes. School is 5 mins walk away so there is a limited amount that can go wrong and I have contingency plans in place if I'm coming from elsewhere. But I do adjust my behaviour according to expectations and circumstances, as I've repeatedly said. That includes for friends who'd think twice about waiting around for a bit.