People Who Need to Be Late

There is a reason people talk about arriving five minutes early.

It gives you a little margin.
It helps keep you from being late.
But more than that, it is a minimal form of consideration for the other person's time.

Keeping time is not just a matter of being neat or punctual by temperament.
It is closer to acknowledging that the other person also has a schedule, and that their time has weight.

That is why I have come to feel a much stronger sense of discomfort than I used to when I see someone casually arrive late to something with a fixed start time.

A meeting, a dinner, a simple appointment, it does not really matter.
If the time has been set and someone treats that lightly,
it feels almost the same as quietly consuming someone else's time without asking.

I did not always feel this strongly about it.

I used to think:
They must be busy.
Their schedule is probably packed.
A small delay cannot be helped.

That was roughly how I explained it away, and for a while, I really did let it pass.

But when the same thing keeps happening, it stops looking accidental.
You begin to see that it is not that they happened to be late.
It is that keeping time itself ranks low for them.

Once, I was walking to a meeting room with someone who was often late.
The meeting was due to start in another two or three minutes.

If we kept going, we would make it exactly on time.
If anything, we still had a little room to spare.

Then he said:

"Let's go smoke."

For a moment, I genuinely did not understand what he meant.

It was not that we were already running late and he wanted a cigarette anyway.
We were still in a position to arrive on time, and even so, he wanted to smoke first.

That was the moment I started to feel that, for this person, time was not something to be honored according to the situation.
It was something that could be shifted around according to mood.

This was not a problem of busyness.
It was a difference in how time itself was ranked.

I once asked him why.

"I don't really like arriving right on time."

Something about that answer felt off.

Matching the agreed time is not the sort of thing that should be adjusted according to personal preference.

If you bring private feeling into it,
what gets used for that adjustment is not your own time but the other person's.

The person who is kept waiting loses something too.
Even if they say nothing, even if they simply stand there and wait, their time is already being taken from them.

If I want to put it a little cruelly,
I sometimes suspect that making people wait gives certain people the feeling of placing themselves in a superior position.

Of course, I do not know whether that is truly what they mean to do.
But whatever the intention, the shape it creates is often very close to that.

Being late can look like a small thing.
But when it happens again and again, it quietly changes the shape of a relationship.

It becomes natural that you are the one who waits,
and natural that the other person is the one who makes you wait.
That accumulation wears a person down more than it first appears to.

That is why I decided to keep my distance from people who repeatedly cannot keep time.

This is not really a matter of minutes.
It is a matter of how they treat other people.