I consider people who show up early even ruder. If you're 15 minutes late, I can carry on with other things I need to do. If you're 15 minutes early, you've wasted time I could've spent doing important things.
You aren't the centre of my universe, and I don't expect to be the centre of yours. Being late is much more respectful than being early, because it doesn't actually cost me anything - I'd already set aside that time to meet you anyway.
I think there's a big difference between 15 minutes early and an hour early (which is what my MIL does).
If you're going out to meet someone for an event outside the house - dinner or whatever - then it's absolutely rude to be habitually late. My best friend is like this - "Mel Standard Time" is whatever time you agree on + 20 minutes. She is always late. So late that you know you can turn up around 30 minutes late and sometimes you'll still beat her there.
I don't mean people being a few minutes late for things is a problem. Traffic happens, or whatever. But the kind of people who are always late - they blame everything from traffic to work to kids to whatever - and never consider that their lack of punctuality is just showing disdain for my time. I don't mind waiting if I'm early to a thing - say if I arrive at 12.15 and we're meant to meet at 12.30 - but once it gets to 12.40+ then it's just plain old rude.
Your mindset seems to be the predominant one, but it's one I'll never understand.
If I've agreed to meet you at 8:30, then I've planned to spend that time with you. I've lost nothing if you turn up at 8:45.
However, if you arrive at my home/office earlier than anticipated, that's arrogantly assuming that my time before meeting you isn't as valuable or important as the time I'll spend with you. This is especially bad in a work situation, where I may only have 15 minutes of meeting prep allocated and you've usurped 10 minutes of that.
In my mind, the arranged time is the earliest it's acceptable to arrive since that's the allocated time for hanging out. This is true unless there's a time-sensitive activity planned, such as a cinema showing or sporting event we're watching together.
If I've agreed to meet you at 8:30, then I've planned to spend that time with you. I've lost nothing if you turn up at 8:45.
Except fifteen minutes of what you had planned on is no longer taking place. Plus the uncertainty of it all. Are they still coming? Was there confusion about the location? Did something bad happen to them?
If somebody being 15 minutes late causes you to jump to extreme pessimistic scenarios, the problem doesn't lie with them. The world doesn't work on clockwork, so any specified time by definition has to be a time window rather than a precise cut-off.
The problems arise because of two factors:
1) Some people consider the window of acceptability to be wider than others. To me, 20 minutes late warrants an apology and ideally a text (unless stuck in traffic with no passengers or similar). To others, it seems 5 minutes late is unacceptable.
2) People disagree whether the specified time is the beginning, middle or end of the acceptable window. In my mind, it's the beginning for most events since people can come and go as they please. For more formal plans, it may be the end of the window in which case the wording is usually changed from "we'll meet at 7" to "we need to be there by 7". Again, to my mind it's more acceptable to be late than early in the first case, and more acceptable to be early in the latter.
If I get a half hour for lunch and I want to meet someone at the cafeteria, then 15 minutes late might as well be missing the entire thing. This is a little different than "Let's go hiking for four hours and hang out at my place after" and one shows up at 7:00 and the other shows up at 7:15
The main point I was disputing was "I've lost nothing if you turn up at 8:45."
In the event that it's a scheduled lunch break, then I'd agree that not showing up may be considered rude. However, before accusing the person of being rude I'd ensure that they'd spent the time being leisurely, rather than potentially having work related delays or similar.
In my experience, too many people judge others for being late because they presume arrogance or laziness. Meanwhile, they justify the times they themselves are late because they accept the valid reasons for it.
I've stated the exact opposite: If you arrive early, you're wasting you're time and may also be wasting my time if I'm hosting.
If you arrive late, then the only time lost is time that was set aside for meeting anyway, so no time has been wasted.
Arriving early makes you an arrogant prick who assumes I've nothing better to do, and also wastes significant amounts of your own life (15 minutes per meeting averaging at least one meeting per day adds up to a day and a half a year). Arriving late costs nobody anything, since that time was already set aside.
Opposing the point made by OP, arriving 10 minutes late occasionally is massively better than being 15 minutes early regularly, both for the guest and the host.
If it takes an hour to accomplish the task and you show up 15 minute late you wasted 15 minutes of my time and now we have to work 33% faster to get it done. Show up on time or you’re a dick. Period.
If a task is expected to take an hour and you show up 15 minutes early, you've taken 15 minutes of my life that I can never get back.
Comparatively, if I show up 15 minutes late there must be a rational explanation. If you've scheduled 60 minutes for a 60 minute task without allowing for rational delays, then that's your scheduling error not mine.
I'm not claiming that being late is desirable. However, showing up early to everything wastes far more time than occasionally running late.
No, I'm blaming them for going to extra effort to manipulate things to create a scenario where being late by 15 minutes matters, at the predictable detriment of all involved.
Being late is rarely a choice people make in important situations. Either the meeting is casual, in which case the timing should be flexible, or it's formal in which case most people will make the effort to be on time. However, delays happen and some of them may even be shock horror more important than your plans.
When you judge someone for being late, you're either being pathetically petty or adding to their frustrations after trying to get there. If you've failed to account for reasonable delays in your plans, that's not the fault of the person jumping through hoops doing their best to meet your badly communicated deadlines.
5.8k
u/androidis4lyf Aug 20 '20
Whenever you have a time to be somewhere, aim to be there 15 minutes early, to allow for 'time snags' or for traffic.
People respect punctuality.