How long to wait for the late person ? (mom, anxiety, husband)
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Biz Meeting? I start em on time. No waiting. Close door just to make sure the late comers have to make a scene announcing their tardiness.
Taxi from hotel to airport on a biz trip? I will give em a few extra minutes...maybe 15 if there is extra time, but i have left em to their own transportation many times.
Cocktail Party,
North: Better not be there any earlier than 30 minutes after the "start" time or you look like a geek..
South: Better be there on time or you look like a northerner.
Europe: If you go earlier than one hour after start time you look like an American who didn't get invited to the pre-cocktail cocktail party. Two hours "late" is even more fashionable.
Biz Meeting? I start em on time. No waiting. Close door just to make sure the late comers have to make a scene announcing their tardiness.
Taxi from hotel to airport on a biz trip? I will give em a few extra minutes...maybe 15 if there is extra time, but i have left em to their own transportation many times. .
Cocktail Party,
North: Better not be there any earlier than 30 minutes after the "start" time or you look like a geek..
South: Better be there on time or you look like a northerner.
Europe: If you go earlier than one hour after start time you look like an American who didn't get invited to the pre-cocktail cocktail party. Two hours "late" is even more fashionable.
For late doctors, it's not always the office staff's fault. I worked for a doc once that routinely ran 2 to 3 hours late, sometimes even more. And it's not that he wasn't there, he just spent way more time with patients than they were allotted. A 15 minute appointment would be 30 minutes, 45 minutes, even an hour. New patient appointments for an hour, could last up to 2 plus hours. And if somebody called duriing the evening prior, he'd tell them to come in the next day without an appointment, whether it was a true emergency or not, and whether they probably should have gone to the ER thst might. We, the staff, had to deal with the angry patients. So, we started telling them to call before they came so we could give them an updated estimate of when to come, and we started blocking out times so he could catch up. Well, he found out about both of those measures because I suppose a patient mentioned it to him. He chewed out the office manager up one way and down the other. She tried to tell him about how angry the patients got, but he didn't want to hear it. All 3 of us eventually left pretty much in mass because we got tired of dealing with ticked off people when there was nothing we could do about it.
I definitely go along with the 15-minute rule in most cases. I'll wait longer if I can do something else while waiting and am not in a hurry, or if there is extremely heavy traffic that I would not expect the other person to have reasonably been able to anticipate. But you don't get to use normal heavy rush-hour traffic as an "excuse" - in my book, if you are over the age of 16 and fail to anticipate heavy traffic with a modicum of common sense - it's on you (even if you are taking a bus or Uber - come on people, you know they use the roads too).
I usually tell new acquaintances, "I'll wait 20 minutes for anyone, but 21 minutes for no one." And then I stick to that, unless something truly emergent has come up. I can't stand habitually late people--seems like passive-aggressive behavior to me.
This is how it seems to me and I have one long term friend who is HABITUALLY late. She stopped for a little while because I pitched a wall eyed fit about it and just walked out on her and refused to reschedule and told her how it made me feel, but she eventually slipped back into it. Oh and when I called her hand on it, surprisingly she didn't offer any excuses, but she did start crying. Oh well. I didn't feel bad and I didn't budge. I was sick of it. But the thing is - I want to keep the friendship. This is her one big flaw and it's not personal - she lives like this and she's too old to change it - obviously. I don't want all that crying drama every time I call her hand on it.
So now if I'm meeting her some place I just show up 15 minutes late and if she happens to be there (has happened one time) I just say something like "Oh, you're here already!" and go on. It bugs me to be late personally but I'd rather be late than sit around waiting for her getting madder by the minute.
She called me one time and said "I'm leaving the grocery store parking lot right now!" but I could HEAR HER in the store. She wasn't leaving the grocery store! And why was she going to the grocery store anyway if she was supposed to be sitting in front of me by now? Good grief. I was so mad. And then I watched her in the parking lot of the coffee shop we were meeting at - you never saw anyone move so slowly and so casually - first of all, she sat in her car talking with someone on the phone, and then she meandered out of her car and meandered across the parking lot, and meandered into the store. I was not a happy camper. It was after that, that I decided I was just going to be 15 minutes late when meeting up with her. Every single time. And sometimes I STILL beat her!
I think she has always been like this, with everyone actually, and I don't take it personally but I do think it's a serious personality flaw.
Everyone can get delayed for a multitude of reasons. Considerate people do what they can to inform the person waiting for them or at least apologize. Chronically late people are a different matter. Being late is just a symptom of a larger problem. They may be a disorganized person who has never learned how to deal with time. In a way they are still a child. Other chronically late people are manipulators, control freaks. They don't care about anyone but themselves. Its more than mere rudeness.
I had a dear friend many years ago who was chronically late for almost everything. It was hard to be angry with him because he was a generous, kind, friendly person about everything else. He always felt terrible when he'd made someone else wait for him, apologetic, contrite. He was never rude (other than keeping people waiting) or unpleasant to anyone. I viewed him as one of those people who had no sense of time, couldn't prioritize tasks, couldn't resist getting sidetracked. Disorganized to the core of his being. People who knew him soon learned not to count on him for anything time related. If he would need to be somewhere they gave him a different deadline than everyone else. They also stopped expecting him to be on time and set plans that didn't depend on him showing up. If he showed up great. If not, oh well better luck next time.
This right here is exactly how the one friend of mine seems to be - a very disorganized person who is easily distracted. She also seems to be oblivious though. She's rarely apologetic. I also think she knows she has a time problem and she's a bit deceitful about it, makes excuses, etc. It seems tiring to me personally. I would hate to be her. But like your friend, she is also generous, ind, friendly, etc.
My step son is always, always late. Late, late, late.
One time he was late and GOT STOPPED BY THE POLICE FOR SPEEDING because he was already late. He somehow or another got mad at us because he was speeding - but we said "If you'd already been where you were supposed to be, you wouldn't have been speeding." Which is the truth. Dang.
I mean he got stopped for speeding AFTER he was already supposed to have met us! Of course he was speeding - he was going to be at least 20 minutes late but of course he wasn't answering his phone or calling or texting us.
Last edited by KathrynAragon; 05-31-2021 at 07:55 AM..
This right here is exactly how the one friend of mine seems to be - a very disorganized person who is easily distracted. She also seems to be oblivious though. She's rarely apologetic. I also think she knows she has a time problem and she's a bit deceitful about it, makes excuses, etc. It seems tiring to me personally. I would hate to be her. But like your friend, she is also generous, ind, friendly, etc.
I honestly think chronically late people legitimately think that everything will take 5 minutes. Taking a shower, that grocery store errand, rush hour traffic. It's all 5 minutes.
I honestly think chronically late people legitimately think that everything will take 5 minutes. Taking a shower, that grocery store errand, rush hour traffic. It's all 5 minutes.
Right - and my friend is older than me (she's 68). She has developed a tremor in her hand (it's innocent but still a tremor) and it makes her EVEN SLOWER. She's honestly like the slowest person I know. She has so many redeeming qualities but they are slowly (there's that word) being overshadowed by her idiosyncrasies. But now I'm wondering if I continue to cut her more and more slack because honestly, I'm starting to think she may have mild dementia or something.
The other day she said "Oh just meet me at my house and we'll go out to eat." OK, I already knew she wasn't going to be ready - and she wasn't. And she called me and postponed it another half hour and she STILL wasn't ready when I got there. I mean, not even close to being ready. Now - we are going out to eat dinner, right? Well, she was hungry so she actually put a Lean Cuisine in the microwave and ate that! Made me sit there and watch her eat it. And I said, "You know, we're going out to eat, so don't get full." It made no difference to her. And we could have ordered and probably gotten our food in the time it took for her to cook and eat that stupid microwave dinner. I honestly don't get it. I think she's starting to lose it frankly. So I just show up whenever (which is difficult for me because I am naturally a punctual person) and am just prepared to wait on her and also to deal with her behavior when she does show up.
I found out that she and her husband (who died last year) only ate out at basically three places - one super casual place, one pretty casual place and one "nicer" place (the Olive Garden - and she was raised in a very traditional Italian family!). I didn't realize that for the longest. She likes to act all cool and techy and all that so one time she said "You pick where we eat out!" and I chose a sort of hip, trendy Asian fusion place - one of my favorite places actually. I thought she'd like it. She acted really flustered the entire time and when we were done, she looked at me with TEARS IN HER EYES and said "Can we never eat here again?" COME ON. The service was fine and the food was as delicious as ever.
So yeah, I think she's going to get worse over time. Oh well.
Oh and since her husband died, she seems absolutely lost. Absolutely lost. My husband died one week to the minute before her husband died and my husband dying was a total shock (hers was sick for a long, long time and under hospice care). So she's worse than ever about being late and being flustered. I think she just does not know how to cope without someone riding her and staying on top of things for her. It's not going to be me, though.
Yes, I think she thinks everything is going to take her five minutes when it takes her 20 minutes every single time. The only reason why I put up with it at all is because I feel sorry for her at this point and because she is such a sweet person overall.
If the person don't txt or call me about being late, I wait 15 minutes and leave.
Waiting longer just promotes tardiness.
Same here.
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Great post !
