AITA for telling my chronically-late friend the wrong time so they would show up on time?
AITA for telling my chronically-late friend the wrong time so they would show up on time...and then they actually got there early?
I have a chronically late friend who shows up 15-45mins late to everything, 90% of the time. Usually she'll send a text that she'll be late, but she sends it when she should already be there/a few minutes before the agreed time and it's soooo annoying.
Things have improved a bit when a few months ago, I told her that for a recent hangout we had, if I hadn't reminded them/pushed back the time, I would have shown up on time and would have been waiting for them and those kind of things are annoying, could she text when she'll know she'll be leaving the house so I can arrive the same time as her?
She's been doing that, which has been helpful. But it doesn't change the fact that she still has to show up late than the time we agreed to (which sometimes forces me to push back my other plans) so I decided to test some advice I've seen people often recommend online for late people: tell them an earlier time.
I hosted a gathering at my place last week and told my friend to come at 7 and told everyone else separately to come at 8. My friend actually got there at 7 for the first time ever. 💀 When she asked where was everyone, I said, "Well, you usually come late to things, so I thought I'd try to tell you an earlier time so you could get here on time."
My friend then told me she had other things she could have done if I hadn't told her the wrong time and was noticeably pissed with me the rest of the night. I later got a text from her that she's bothered with what I did and found my actions passive aggressive and childish. I feel like common advice of how to handle late friends completely blew up in my face. AITA?
Here's what people had to say to OP:
ladystetson wrote:
NTA.
Pro-tip. When you tell one person to come earlier, never admit it straight out. You just let them wait for everyone else and then they can know how everyone feels waiting for them.
OP responded:
Well, it was pretty awkward and obvious since it was only me and her when she got there at 7, and she directly asked me what's going on.
MaySeeMeeLater wrote:
ESH. You said they're usually 15-45 minutes late, and you gave them a time that was a full hour earlier. That's excessive if you're just trying to get them to arrive right on time. While they should be more reliable, they're right that you wasted their time unnecessarily.
If they needed to be there by 8, you should have just told them 7:45, maybe 7:30 at most. That way it lines up more with how late they usually are, and if they did get there early it wasn't going to be as much of a waste of time for them.
Dumpstahkat wrote:
Yeah. OP, if this is a friendship you value, I would strongly suggest disregarding other people's petty suggestions and just...having a straightforward, honest conversation and setting firmer boundaries with her. Something along the lines of, "Look, I'm sorry for tricking you [bc you did do that] and I'm sorry for wasting your time."
"But maybe now you can better understand why it feels so disrespectful and frustrating when you do the same thing by showing up late all the time. I would rather 'waste time' being early and still getting to hang out with you than waste time not hanging out with you 'cause you're always late and not getting to do the other stuff I could've been doing if you had been on time."
"If I can't rely on you to be on time, that means that whenever we have plans, I get stuck in that limbo of not being able to have ANY other plans around that because I don't know whether or not you will show up when we both previously agreed to."
"Just assuming that you'll be late doesn't work because occasionally you are on time, and assuming that you'll be on time doesn't work bc that also doesn't happen consistently."
"So making ANY plan with you requires me to have an hour-wide buffer on each end in which I can't reliably make any other plans just in case you're late, and that level of disrespect towards me and my time just isn't sustainable anymore."
"Something's gotta change. I thought that just telling you an earlier time could be a workable solution. I clearly thought wrong. So I would love to brainstorm other ideas together."
"Barring that, in the future when you are late, I am not going to continue waiting around for you. If we're meeting for dinner and I'm already there and you're over 10 min late, for instance, I'll either start by myself or I'll just leave. I like hanging out with you and would really like to keep doing so. But I'm not gonna continue wasting hours of my time because you don't respect me enough to be on time."
trick_delivery4609 wrote:
NTA.
"Good. Now you see how the rest of us feel."
ugh_idfk wrote:
NTA. Idk why, but some people just cannot be on time. One of them is my own fiance. And since my dad was one of those people who lived by "if you're on time, you're late," I have to be early to everything so we often clashed over this.
I finally just started telling him an earlier time for any functions we attended together. He caught on after a couple of years and just laughed it off. Your friend is an AH They know that they're late and just doesn't care. Their time is not more valuable than anyone else.