No, you are not "running late", you are rude & selfish
gregsavage.com.au
gregsavage.com.au
The talk was scheduled. People showed up. No speaker was visible. The doors closed. People sat there. Finally someone got unhappy enough to leave. Discovered that the doors were locked. Soon the whole room was up in arms.
Then the speaker got up from the first row, went to the stage, and said, "I did this because no words are as effective as demonstrating the point. Yes, you are all busy people. But your patients are busy people as well. Many bill hourly so time is literally money to them. So don't waste their time and money by being late."
I wish there was some sort of system to know exactly how far behind (if at all) your doctor was running that you could check online to minimize lost time.
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When someone is always late, that is rude and inconsiderate.
Consider that for the person that is always late, it is probably a bigger problem than for you. She has to endure it in all parts of her life. Assuming that the problem is that she simply doesn't care is as ignorant as assuming that a dyslectic simply doesn't care to learn how to read or write correctly.
You can't just compare two things that on the surface may vaguely seem the same, and just assert they are the exact same thing.
Dyslexia is a recognized medical (psychological?) condition. Being chronically late is just rudeness, plain and simple. If you constantly lose track of the time, buy a watch. Set an alarm. Use a smartphone with a calendar that will remind you of things. Take responsibility for your actions and don't try to excuse the inexcusable as some sort of "condition."
I'm fully aware that being chronically to early or to late is not a recognized medical condition. Research at this point merely concludes that the downsides of chronically lateness is too great for laziness or procrastination being the major driving force.
Dyslexia is categorized neither as a medical or psychological condition, but as a "learning disorder". It is my belief that research will come to a point where
You are correct that it is rude to be late. Rudeness is defines by culture and in my culture (and I suppose yours) it is rude to be late. It is not a universal thruth however, as other posters have stated, since cultural differences exist.
All of the above tells me that chronical lateness is not "just rude". There is more to it, which makes it a far more interesting phenomenon than most other kinds of rudeness.
I'm a chronic late-comer. As a result I get extremely anxious about arriving late for things. Sometimes this results in turning up very early (also considered rude) or having so much time that I have to do something else first, which again often results in lateness.
Personally I put it down to a poor ability to keep track of time dyschronia I guess one could call it.
If I wear a watch I don't look at it, if I set an alaram I'll override it. I've tried putting clocks forward. I get google alerts texted to me, 3 seconds later I've forgotten; I have an extremely poor memory.
I'm very one tracked, struggle with multitasking (NMIs causing a context switch at least).
Not an excuse? Then I must be lazy and unreliable - I'm running 1½ businesses (13-14 hour days the last couple), bringing up 2 kids, meet most of my deadlines, etc..
Inexcusable? Perhaps I'm just built differently.
You are not a precious and unique snowflake.
I'm wondering now if there are any studies of time keeping abilities in the self confessed "dyschronic". Some people have (actually) no concept of temporal relationships and can't judge time passing, is it too far a leap to imagine there is a sliding scale of this condition?
Snarkiness aside, being late is not a medical/neurological issue, or something that just /happens' to people. It's a character flaw that only exists because the person who has it doesn't have the will or willpower to change it. It affect everybody he/she interacts with yet through sheer arrogance and self-centeredness, nothing is done about it. No sugar coating on this one - I'm willing to accept that a minority of fat people do genuinely have medical issues, and that dyslectics truly have malfunctioning brains, but for people that are chronically too late, we shouldn't make excuses.
(not meant as an attack, if it sounds hostile it's because I've wound myself up over the this the last two weeks at least a dozen times. People are actually surprised when you're on time, or try to make it to appointments even when there are some minor obstacles! That attitude is so morally corrupt it makes me angry, luckily every now and then I meet someone who's not like this (like this morning) and then my blood pressure can go down again ;) )
We grade our personal productivity level much more than other cultures. Other cultures value other things such as community and relationships at a higher level than we do.
A story:
I was invited to an Indian friend's birthday party. It was going to be a huge party with hundreds of invited people (all Indian, except two people), musicians, a hire clown, and a full-fledged buffet. The invitation stated 6pm. I arrived at 6:30pm because, well, I expected them to start late.
Guess what, only two people were there: the birthday friend, because he had to set up the place, and a white guy, who was even more confused than me.
So the white guy and I helped our friend set up. Then we kicked the soccer ball around for a bit. Just waiting.
People started to slowly trickled in at about 8pm. I don't think we started eating at about 9pm. And it was all normal to them.
The line beginning with "other cultures" is untestable horsepuckey reminiscent of the absolute worst tripe in American multicultural studies. And I have a degree in that. It survives only because it flatters the preconceptions of an Ameican subculture in academia who prefers to have a ready critique of Western culture, as if such a thing existed.
I am not saying that one way of thought is better than the other. I just wanted people to understand that their perception concerning punctuality is perhaps mostly based on their cultural upbringing, not on some universal human truth.
In the end it all sort of averages out and everybody seems to be just a hair perpetually late.
If you don't believe there are differences in punctuality between cultures then you just haven't experienced those cultures.
I still don't get the non sequitur attack on academia.
Context is everything. Parties, many types of social situations are different. But if someone plans e.g. a meeting and it's important for everyone to be there (otherwise, why are they invited?) then you'd better (1) be on time or (2) suggest an alternate time when you know you can make it. If there's some question, there's no shame in saying so. Do that so that the other people can make their plans. If you can't make plans and stick to them, WTF are you doing?
(+) Mobile phones have made everybody commitment-shy losers.
It isn't all of us. I'm never casually late for an appointment, and am always annoyed if the other party is, beyond the reasonable 10 minutes. And this is not because of any incipient effect of Western culture.
Please stop with the generalizing about pan-cultural differences in the perceived value of productivity, community, etc. Neither does an anecdote about a birthday party generalize to business situations.
She'll now tell my dad's relatives to show up at 4p because they operate on "Indian Standard Time".
And funnily enough, my father is always 5 minutes early for everything...
What I really objected to was the stereotyping. I know I'm not the only Indian who cares about punctuality.
(for the record, my personal perception of Indians is that they are quite punctual, because the Indians I've worked with were, and I didn't really have an opinion about it one way or another before that. Latin Americans on the other hand, let's just say that my experiences only reinforced the preexisting notions...)
That "oversimplified" is what makes it an unreasonable assumption.
My point was coming from a slightly different notion of 'stereotype' where it's more similar to 'preconceived notion'. Maybe it's just a language thing.
What I'm objecting to is what I have explained I mean by the word in the context of the original assertion by elbenshira, viz. that regard for punctuality is predominantly an American/Western trait.
And if you don't mind, this is all I have to say about it.
Again, I object to the stereotyping. "You're on time. How American of you!"
My point was to compare cultures, not to put down one or the other.
This is a sign of bad time management on top of rudeness.
I have known people who were continually late, so I would always tell them 30 minutes before I get there. Effective technique.
Things were worse before mobiles of course, I would wait for 10 minutes, and then head off. This was an accepted rule among my friends.
It is considered rude in Germany, Sweden and the UK. Taking a book when going to meet someone, is also considered a little rude, but understandable.
It all depends on the local culture. In Poland, besides business meetings, there's a 15 minutes space, only after that it's considered being late; and yes, in big cities we're also all into that western 'being always in a hurry' thing (which I personally don't like).
For reasons I probably couldn't convey to the author of this article- learning to accept time's transience can greatly improve quality of life. Or less romantically: dude... chill out... everything will be ok.
I told her I have been coming to you for 15 years but don’t take me for granted.
...
Me? Am I ever late? Sure, sometimes. That’s inevitable even with the best intentions. But I never plan to be late. I never ‘let time slide’ because my stuff is more important than yours.
I am not talking about the odd occasion of lateness. I am talking about people who are routinely late. In fact, never on time.
You seem to give yourself much more slack than you allow others. You're not talking about people who are occasionally late, and yet you walked out on your dentist who was late once in 15 years, from the sound of it.
Most patients are in and out, but a few take extra time, and they rarely know which ones, so they just assume they are all quick cases.
Always schedule meetings like this as early as you can.
I like this idea... everybody else is planning to be late just to annoy the OP.
Although TBH they seem quite easy to wind up... I wouldn't be suprised if from now on everybody that needs to meet them wouldn't do just that :)
1. Plan around it - be somewhere where the person being late doesn't affect you. Have people meet you at your home or at a cafe where you're doing other work or reading a book and it doesn't adversely affect you. Oftentimes, if I'm traveling with a group of people, I give a time range - "Be there between 7:30PM and 8PM" - that lets the early birds get there at 7:30, and the "oh shoot! gotta run!" people ideally get there by 8PM, but the early birds don't get offended and feel disrespected (I'm more or less an early bird, I hate being late - but I've got some friends and acquaintances who just aren't that way).
2. If you really want to get people to cut it out, make real world consequences. Say "the meeting starts at 9:05 sharp, the doors will be shut and no one will be admitted after that." Think really hard if the situation calls for it, but it does work if you do stuff like that. If you're a professor, you could say to anyone coming in late - "get out. see you next week." You won't have people showing up late if you announce you're going to do that and follow through. Up to you to judge if you want that sort of environment, and you've got to really be on top of things and deliver straight out the gate if you're being hardcore that people have to be there. But it does work.
It worked. Class started on time, with the question and answer period that I thought was the most important part of class, but which the students probably didn't realize was that important. (Well they did partway into the course. But that is another story.)
I've noted some people in my experience to consider this to be late, 15 minutes before stated time is what they consider to be on time. This pisses me off to no end. If you wanted me there at 1:45pm i'd have gladly appeared at that time, just dont say one thing and mean another. GRRRR
You decided to have kids, not me.
With kids, even when we try to start getting ready an hour earlier, we tend to forget things because of the number of things required and all of the distractions caused by the kids, including them not doing what you tell them to do.
Do I rush around in the car at times telling the kids that we're running late again? Yes.
Would some of you that are complaining about those that are late also be late if you had kids that had difficulty getting things done on time and you were more scatterbrained with kids than without? Yes.
People that procrastinate a bit, aren't type A, and tend to enjoy life rather than planning all the time, sometimes/often are late. It sucks, and it is rude and shows lack of planning and caring enough about being on-time.
You are on-time. That is great.
Context. Always context. If your event does not require strict adherence to starting times, don't require strict adherence to starting times. If it does, keep your view of your importance in scope with theirs, and for God's sake learn to adapt when things don't go flawlessly so glitches don't stop everything. Life is rarely flawless.
I fondly remember a quarterly kickoff meeting where my boss ripped one of the more pretentious reps a new one as she sidled in 30 minutes late. It didn’t happen again.
Having said that - finding parking, catching public transport (oh God those trains – shudder) and just getting around Sydney in general is a bitch.
These two segments of the local population always seem to grate on one another, this is a good case study of exactly how.
This is in response to wage and staff concerns mostly, and I believe that the fares for the train services at least in Sydney are mandated to be fixed at a certain level unless they pass some kind of bureaucratic process. So, the union won't let the budget slide in the direction of infrastructure spending rather than wages and staff spending, simultaneously the fare fixing keeps the pool of money for the system fairly static.
Thus, infrastructure projects in public transport are glacial / non existent depending on your point of view, for about the past fifteen years I have been hearing about a line being added between Epping and Parramatta that is still yet to be completed, I'm not sure it's even been started.
The fact that the public transport is so bad results in people that really need to keep a tight schedule attempting to minimise their reliance on said system, they'll get a car or move some place very close to their place of work (thus perhaps contributing to the ridiculous rents and real estate prices in Sydney). The less people use it, the less people complain about it, the less reason the tragically inefficient system has to actually improve, and frankly it would probably take the threat of armed invasion to get them to pull their shit together at any rate.
This is a pretty accurate measure of the value of a recruiter's time vs. a dentist's. Medicos maintain a queue to ensure almost full utilization for their valuable services.
However I notice the poster talks about 9AM meetings. In every company I've worked for, there are people who have a habit of scheduling meetings at the very beginning of the working day, at 8 or 9AM. There are also programmers who have a habit of coming in later, at 10 or 11AM, which is fine except the days when there are meetings.
You can write and complain and admonish and discipline, but sooner or later you have to realize scheduling meetings first thing in the morning doesn't work for non-morning people. They will always be late, or slow, tired, and out of it. If you notice that about 1/3 of your staff never makes the 8AM meeting on time, it's the meeting time and not the staff that's the problem.
Also, making meetings very long and irrelevant encourages tardiness. You've decided to waste my time by making me go to a big group meeting where two people are going to argue about something that does not impact my work. Fine, but don't expect me to make an extra effort to rush to it. I can get some of my time back by being late.
Disentangling from the chronically late is worth the time. Some situations enforce punctuality. You can also pick a set-time activity for the meeting, like the start of a movie. You can also apply penalties: I once had a professor who allowed students to be as late as they want, but he would only collect homework until the start of class. Other situations, like travel, open the possibility of finding alternate arrangements. I have also resorted to giving earlier meeting times than the actual meeting time, but this has extra consequences.
His girlfriend catches the look on his face while he's helping with the coats and hisses "not now!".
As the dinner party progresses, conversation remains strained as the last of their friends arrive "Sorry mate, traffic was awful", Greg mutters something under his breath while everybody pretends not to hear.
Later, once everyone's left it's same argument again: her friends are "productivity obstacles" while she chokes back the tears she asking why he won't just let it go. The anger, coiled like a spring in his stomach is still there though: this is important, why don't they realise... !?
He had me until the dentist story. I don't think that a dentist actually plans to let patients wait, but it does happen. A dentist (mine at least) usually plans in contingency for emergencies, but it may still happen that he overshoots.
Question: Would you rather have your dentist hand out his cell phone # after treating you on a Friday and their may be some complexities on the weekend for the price of waiting the occasional 20 minutes or a guaranteed punctual dentist who lets you wait for three weeks while you agonize in pain?
The curious thing about it is that it would only need to be about 20% to get everyone clear, but instead of that, nearly every patient ends up needing to wait for an hour, because there is always an emergency that needs addressing each day. I wonder why we don't see doctor's surgeries or dentists doing this. Anyone have an idea?
"the solution to being able to handle emergencies quickly is the same as the solution to being able to see patients on time"
That's exactly what I said; just with slightly different words.
The victimization aspect (3 wasted hours) could also be avoided by not passively sitting and waiting to start.
Also, mobile phones .. the person being late will generally call (and maybe during 3 hours (!!) the person waiting might ring and find out whats going on).
Waiting, doing nothing for 3 hours and then complaining about it seems a bit passive aggressive, I think I would wait an hour tops.
Also, not every employee can accomplish that much in 10 minutes. A support or business person could fire off an e-mail or two, but an engineer suffers when time is broken into small chunks. Engineers are also paid pretty well, so when you're talking about 3 hours of "engineer-time" wasted, the cost to the company adds up.
Similarly showing up on time and waiting some indefinite time for people to show up is a pain. I'm ashamed to admit it but I've started being a bit late to things because I find that almost always other people aren't on time either.
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Now that is rude
That is the only polite way to behave when meeting up with somebody.
If you're asking people to go to a place that you're familiar with and they're not, just assume they're going to be twenty minutes to half an hour late.
I've lost track of the number of times my GPS has guided me around a circle for 15 minutes, or up to a detour sign, or to turn left on a no left turn sign.
The manager scowled. "People, if you can't run a meeting on time, I don't know how you're ever going to run a program on time."
Attendance was prompt thereafter.
One thing that annoys me to no end: people who are very early. If I plan my schedule carefully around you being there at 2pm (or later) and you show up 20 minutes early, you are going to sit around for 20 minutes, and I'll feel like an asshole, even though it's your fault.
Why? I would try to make it as uncomfortable for them as possible so they don't do that anymore.
I've said for a while now that being late is making the statement that you don't value the other party's time.
First, the problem isn't easily fixed. Here's the deal: At her HMO each doctor has a panel of several thousand patients. Each patient visit during a normal clinical day gets a 15 minute allocation with the MD. It used to be 20 minutes at her HMO but was recently reduced in order to increase the patient volume. Typically my wife's schedule is stacked appointment to appointment from 8-Noon and then again from 1-5pm. A couple of time slots are left unscheduled for high priority, emergent visits (if you've got a routine visit, forget it, you'll get something a month or two out into the future).
No as you can imagine, 15 minutes per patient isn't much time. Some patients require more time. With each successive visit, the wait will get longer and longer. This isn't because the doctor (at least some of them) is being a jerk or dismissive, it's because they're trying to do a thorough job with the time allocated. If they can't finish what they need to in 15 minutes, well, she goes over that time. It isn't too hard to realize how screwed up the schedule can get after a couple of tough back-to-back cases.
My wife then tries to catch up during lunch hour because she doesn't take lunch. After working through lunch, she kicks into the afternoon half of clinic hopefully caught up, but sometimes not. And the cycle repeats itself.
The receptionists can't "easily structure" the appointments more appropriately -- at least at the large providers -- b/c they're not the ones running the game.
I'm not going to defend the overall system. That's a much bigger problem and mess that a lot of smart people have looked at and have yet to solve. But I do think it's worth realizing that, yes, many doctors do think your time is valuable and don't purposefully try to waste your time. Many doctors are overworked and are doing the best they can within the parameters of what they've been given to practice medicine and that at some point you might be that person that has an appointment that goes over the time allocated (and when you do, hopefully you'll be happy the doctor ended up being attentive to those needs).
Just hoping to lend some extra perspective (especially as someone who used to feel the same way you do).
The healthcare world is directly analogous to the auto repair world, we just don't fit in the same place:
You, car, mechanic :: Insurance co, you, doctor.
The problem is that meeting a doctor cannot be planned perfectly. A meeting might take 5 minutes, or it might take 20.
If, on average, a doctor can serve 4 patients an hour, and she wants to reach that on a 9-5 working day, she must schedule her first patient at 08:45 or thereabouts. Reason: the first patient might be late. That would give her idle minutes that she would need to serve later patients, some of which might take 20 minutes.
Similarly, she must schedule her second patient at 09:00-ish, to have a patient waiting in case the first one happens to take only 5 minutes to serve.
And yes, that appears rude, but mostly, it is the economical thing to do. You can only get better service by paying your doctor more. You will notice that many people who can afford that are willing to do so. As an extreme example, I doubt that the president of the USA has spent much time waiting for his doctor.
For the maths behind this, google queueing theory.
As for structuring appointments more appropriately, it's quite easy to think of reasons an appointment could take more time than anticipated, and if you had to buffer for that time, you would have to pay for the buffer.
No.
No matter how busy you are, if you're good at planning you can routinely be on time. If you're bad at planning, then you'll have problems no matter how little you have to do. And if you make a point of surrounding yourself with people who are able to manage to be on time, then you'll all get more done.
I value your time, but I value mine more.
As my brother drilled into me a long time ago, "Yes, but..." is just a dishonest way to say "No". Your actions clearly say that you DON'T value other people's time. There is no need to bother pretending otherwise.
And obviously you're not as in demand as other people are.
No. It is called "planning". And not being rude and selfish. You might learn this "planning" thing. It could let you get more done without putting as much effort out.
Sorry you can't appreciate that.
Apparently you are aware that it is inconvenient when other people prove to have desires that are at odds with your selfishness. But you clearly don't let that bother you too much.
My attitude is that people like you are productivity obstacles to route around and avoid.
(For the record I am someone whose natural tendency is to be chronically late. But not when someone else is depending on me.)
With uncertain travel, you have a point. Still if you're a sales person who is supposed to pitch me, be on time or don't bother showing up. Sure, being on time is more expensive for you. But it is less expensive than a wasted trip, so don't make it a wasted trip. If the relationship is more even, then I understand travel delays but expect to see a reasonable attempt. If you're late half the time and early half the time, I'll be OK with it. If I have to consistently wait for you being late, that's going to be a problem.
If I didn't make appointments when I knew there'd be a 20-30% chance of me turning up late I'd make no appointments at all.