To think always being late isn’t a quirky personality trait

[CorianderDestroysFamilies]

I’m meeting my friend today and I already know she’ll be late. Normally she’ll message me at the time we’re supposed to be meeting saying she’s just about to leave so I’ll be stood waiting for 15 minutes, one time she messaged saying she would be an hour late I was already at the meeting point with my DC so it was a waste of all our time.
Anyway I’ve just seen another funny meme about how someone will still be in the bath at the time they should be going out and how hilarious it all is. I just think things like this normalise lateness and justify people like it’s some sort of quirky, unavoidable character flaw when it’s actually really rude and makes people like me less likely to want to see you. So AIBU?

I have a long term friend like this. We probably meet up every couple of months and she is always late. With her it’s more a case of just as I am about to leave I’ll get a text to say something like - I’ve only just left work, so can we make it 2 hours later.
That’s infuriating too. I’m all ready to go and have to sit around twiddling my thumbs.
To be honest as much as I love seeing her it completely puts me off making arrangements.

All these people who claim to have no control over being late - if they won a million pounds and had to arrive by a certain time to claim it, you can bet your arse they wouldn't be late.

It is about priorities - I hate to be rude and inconvenience other people, because I know it is annoying and I care about others feelings. Chronically late people (my sister, my MIL) always put themselves first. I am stuck with family but I would never be friends with a late person - my friends are wonderful, empathetic, caring people.

I think the number of people who have adhd/dyslexia/dyscalcula/medical or neurological issues with the passage of time are outweighed millions of times by people who are just CFs about time.

People know the difference between someone who is late, arrives in a stressed or anxious fluster and apologies for being late, and is “disabled” by this to the extent they stop making arrangements at all - and people who continually swan up an hour late saying things like “oh I decided to do a hair masque and it needed to sit for an hour”...

I find these threads very educational- I genuinely didn’t know that people can be so distressed and disadvantaged by this - however it’s definitely not the case with the vast majority of “late people”.

The thing that fascinates me most on these threads are the many many posters who always say “I don’t understand that when I have arranged to meet someone at 12, that 12 isn’t the time I need to leave the house”. I’ve not seen that on this thread yet but always on other ones. I simply don’t get how people think like that and never learn.

I loathe this trait. It's from people who think their time is more precious than yours ergo they are more important than you.

Drives me mad! And my friends know it. If they are late (and I'm always early) I'll tell them "I was 10 minutes you were 20 minutes lates, so that's means I've been waiting for you for half an hour, is that fair?? Next time I will wait 5 minutes and that's it!"

Funnily enough my late friends are NEVER late for me now!

So so so fucking rude.

I've ditched a friend for this too.

She has always been flaky, disorganised and late. I used to take one of her kids to pre-school for her because of work logistics and she never had him ready. Never. Every bleeding day I would stand there while she ran around looking for shoes/coat/wellies saying things like "oooh, what am I like????" And I'd be standing there thinking "you're a fucking nightmare, that's what you're like".

Fast forward a few years, kids are all older, her children start at similar clubs to mine and she asks if we can do lift shares with some other parents. Mobile numbers swapped, WhatsApp groups set up. Every week there's some drama because she forgot, lost her phone, the phone ran out of battery, she had to go to Asda/the doctor/somewhere else... total ballache. My daughter (who is very punctual) was getting incredibly stressed that she was never picked up on time.

Final straw was when DS mentioned that "friend" was going elsewhere before dropping the boys at their activity. Turns out that her daughter was doing gymnastcs until (for example 6.30pm) and her plan was to drive to teh local sports centre, park up, go inside, get her DD changed (accompanied with much faffing over stuff), get back into the car, then drive the boys to their activity which also started at 6.30pm. She is late every sodding week. (Surprise surprise, you can't be in two places at the same time).

So I don't see her any more. And I don't care if she thinks I'm a bitch. Her behaviour was causing me so much stress and now I lift share and arrange things with people who are reliable.

What I find weird, is that the people I know who are consistently late, get very prickly about it when others point it out in a bantery way. And deny they are always late.

Maybe they just truly believe their life obstacles are so much more real or important than other peoples', that they don't consider themselves to be late, more that they have loads to deal with. Heads up arses.

It boils my blood, lots of people think it's fine, but they are the guilty ones being late.

My Mother is the worst offender and it infuriates me, it's not like she's rushing around, she has unlimited time, I say 'you will be late for your own funeral, oh but hang on, you won't as I will be organising it'.

I never know what the time is and I couldn't tell you how long it takes for me to get something done.

But I am NEVER late because I know I have these flaws and I thus leave a ridiculous amount of time in which to get ready and arrive somewhere. People mock me because of how early I leave to get to the airport or to get down to the bus stop, but I'd rather I was waiting somewhere with my book than being late and making other people wait for my deficiencies.

Being late is rude AF. I hate it and have no patience for it! It didn't take me a long time to build my coping mechanisms because I was always so embarrassed if i was late so I changed the way I did things.

It takes effort to be on time. Punctual people aren't just floating by through sheer luck. They work at being on time because it's the considerate thing to do.

I have a friend like this. I used to let it upset me and stress me out but now I just turn up to wherever we are meeting whenever I am ready to wether that be early, late or on-time.

She seems to have got the message and is making more effort. It only takes keeping THEM waiting a couple of times usually.

greendragon you need to say no it's not ok. I have other things to do! Don't be a mug!

I'm often late. It's not because I think I'm more important than anyone else, it's because I'm a people pleaser and try to put everyone else's needs before my own. This means I over commit and try to take on too much.

I won't be late because I'm 'lazing in the bath', it's because I was trying to please everyone and end up pleasing no-one.

I have to admit I'm often running late by about 5 minutes. I misjudge times and am optimistic about how quickly I can get to appointments/work/school. It's something I'm working on as I know it's rude (though most days I'm not meeting friends).

I wonder if those people with conditions that they say cause them to be late are all holding down jobs and therefore manage to get to work on time?

I have always been utterly and completely stressed with this. When I was a ruse and worked early shifts I wouldn’t sleep properly the night before and would wake up constantly because I was paranoid about being late, which I was on more than one occasion despite my best efforts.

In the end I managed to get myself into jobs with a degree of flexibility....I would try to get to work for 8.30 but if I was 10 mins late I would just stay 10 mins late to make up for it. Those jobs were working in the community and working in research.

I can see why it just looks like poor planning from the outside and I can’t explain it any better than the colour blind thing. I just find it so hard to keep track of time and even though I’m constantly checking the time on my phone when I’m trying to get somewhere is like I’m just watching the minutes sip by from under me. I rush around getting breakfast for example and think “right I have 10 minutes” so I rush making breakfast then look again and 15 mins have passed or whatever. So then I think “we’ll i don’t have time to brush my teeth now then” so I leave it, but then somehow another 5 minutes have passed anyway. I just don’t get it I wish I could because I hate it about myself.... like someone said it’s just some kind of processing disorder. Took me absolutely years to be able to tell the time anyway, I’m still not great with clocks. I prefer digital but not if it’s a 24 hour digital.... it has to be in 1-12 mode because when it goes 13+ I’m screwed it doesn’t make any sense to me at all!!!!

*nurse not ruse

“So anything I do by accident, even if it really hurts someone else, they shouldnt whinge about it?

I'll tell that to the person who's car my uncle wrote off "he didnt do it on purpose, stop whinging”

———

Yeah because the two scenarios are really comparable 🙄 get over yourself

@Motoko where did I say I didn't give a shit ? I'm currently sat here with my dying father, my mother in hospital with terminal lung cancer cancer and trying to manage a ful time job as wrll as a full time carer... if I am 5 mins late for a much needed costa mate date, my friends who know and love me understand....I don't value my time above anyone elses, I have people whose miserable, end of life existence is made slightly more bearable that I am there for them and I can put THEIR needs above mine or anyone elses.

Walk a mile in my shoes before you judge me

All this ‘I have problems processing time ‘. What self-important cobblers.
I’ve stopped seeing a friend because of repeated lateness. (I sat in a restaurant for an hour once. Never again).
I also stopped going to a particular person’s gym classes as she was always late, frequently later than most of the class.
Rude, lazy and disrespectful. Definitely not quirky or appealing.

I realised once that my ex just didn’t see time in the same way as I did.

We had to be somewhere in the next town for (say) 3pm.

I was ready and he said “it’s only a 20 min drive we don’t need to leave til 2.40”.

It was, according to google maps, a 24 min drive and that didn’t include school traffic time, park the car, walk to the building where the appointment was, find reception, talk to the receptionist and then walk to the room with the appointment.

Whereas I was thinking about all those extra steps.

The colour blind analogy isn't the same though. If you are colour blind parts of your eyes physically do not work / or are missing. Something to do with rods and cones iirc. Time planning can be dealt with using external tools like watches, alarms. It's not that people have an innate sense of time at all.. I don't magically know when ten mins has passed or whatever. I use a watch. To those saying 'but then x happens with the kids so then we're late' you factor that in. My DD is awful for deciding just before we leave that she Must have x thing so I chivvy her to be ready ten mins before she actually has to be to allow for that. If she doesn't then do it that day, fine. We're early. If something extra happens like the cat bringing in a dead bird, I deal with that and something else gets left, eg I don't have breakfast, or don't empty the dishwasher so we still leave on time.

My friend is v late, like hours and hours late and it's utterly infuriating. She's v senior at work so does manage when she has to but she does things like arrive at the station at 12 when the train leaves at 12. No time for parking, ticket buying etc. These things are possible to learn, unlike colour blindness. It might be more effort for some than others but it's not the same thing.

Lateness can be a personality trait, but it’s one that can be very annoying for the people waiting for the late person. I definitely wouldn’t consider it cute or quirky.

Lateness is something that I have struggled with, and worked to develop coping strategies for. E.g. for the school run, I have as much as possible prepared the night before, and then a series of about 7 alarms set up on my phone to make sure we stay on track and get out of the house on time.

So I’m rarely late these days, but it’s not been an effortless process getting there.

I know some people do have processing problems that cause them big timekeeping problems - I have a friend like this who is lovely in almost every other way, and I make sure all meet ups are somewhere like each other’s houses where bad timekeeping won’t be a major problem - but if you don’t know someone well then it’s difficult to tell if the bad timekeeping is a processing problem or just them not caring about inconveniencing other people.
I’ve met plenty of late people who act selfishly in other ways and in those cases it’s difficult not to see their lateness as a symptom of their selfishness.

I have said in threads about not realising being late until after the time that the thing starts, rather than after the time you should have left - usually in the past tense.

But I do also think that you will have a sense of this kind of thing or not. The building in of extra time like whodafeck says. Whether it's learned or innate. It probably is learned, but I have definitely seen people post in confusion when they encounter this kind of thinking and essentially say "But this is so obvious?? How could you not realise?"

Also, it's like many other skills - if you have the kind of brain which processes this specific skill like the majority of people then you will learn how to prepare and leave on time simply by doing it, or observing your parents etc doing it multiple times, probably getting it wrong a few times and then adjusting behaviour/expectations etc. You'll "calibrate" to a normal/fairly accurate extent. Obviously everyone misjudges and is late sometimes, but it won't be constantly. Whereas if you have a deficit in that area you won't pick it up in that way, but only if somebody explicitly sits you down and explains each part of the process to you, and again if you get it wrong, if someone helps you to go back over the process and see where you didn't leave enough time. One of the problems of ADHD and dyspraxia (and perhaps some others, I'm not sure) is not being able to see the patterns of your own behaviour, so whereas someone without a deficit in this area could see "Hmm, this keeps happening and it's always because I forget to factor in parking time." Someone with a deficit will tend to see each event as isolated and simply feel unlucky or frustrated that it's happened again or it's "always happening to them" - they won't automatically register that it's something they have control over. For example it took me a really embarrassingly long time to click that it's best to get the train/bus immediately before the one I would really need, in order to allow for delays or cancellations. Before realising that, I would see the bus or train delay as something which was completely outside of my control. Because actually the running of the bus is, but my ability to predict that and get the one before just in case is not.

I absolutely do the "Don't need to leave until 2.40" thing if I'm not paying attention. If I actively added up all the steps - the 4 min extra that I'd "rounded", the time for traffic, parking, walking around, not to mention actually getting my purse, keys, shoes etc together to leave the house I'll conclude that I need to start getting ready at about 12.30 or something and my immediate reaction will be "That CAN'T be right!! It can't take NEARLY THREE HOURS." I'll have such a strong sense of needing to recalibrate this to something more "reasonable" that it takes quite a lot of effort to force myself to either check and add up every little thing and/or remind myself that my estimates are usually unreasonable so my feeling that it's far too long probably means it's about right. But my default mode is to forget all of the extra things and underestimate. I can't seem to recalibrate that.

DHs lifelong friend is chronically late. It's always been somewhat of a standing joke, in their teens and twenties they've missed flights because of him, he's been late for weddings, he's got taxi firms that have blacklisted his address because they've had to sit outside idling for half an hour before he's ready. The only reason he hasn't lost his job because of it is because he works for a family business.

Everyone's in their mid-thirties now, with children (except one or two including him). It's no longer funny. DH doesn't see him anymore, he's made so many arrangements with him that have been ruined because of him being late and everyone's cottoned on to the fact that it's not a funny quirk, he's actually a totally selfish arse who thinks of no one but himself. There are other factors but he's actually losing friends hand over fist now even thought people have told him why.

I can't say I'm sorry. I've never been keen on him his timekeeping and lack of thought for anyone else has always made me really cross. But I'm sad for DH. Prat.

Oh sorry - meant to add - perhaps it's helpful for any MNers with children who struggle with time, just the suggestion that it might not automatically be learnt and that the process can be taught.

When I tried to say anything to my ex, Bertie, to try to get him to learn to do it better, he went off on one, called me controlling and anal. So 🤷‍♀️

I used to live in a country where all meeting times were, I soon learned, ballpark suggestions. Actually sometimes you would just say 'afternoon' for example. I managed to adjust and honestly life still worked fine. But I know some people, including my DH, who could not cope with this cultural difference.