The Trouble with Late People

“I am a patient boy
I wait, I wait, I wait, I wait
My time is water down a drain”
Fugazi, “Waiting Room”

Like addicts, they say that they cannot help themselves. They beg for clemency when arriving thirty minutes late, yet admonish you when your best efforts to muzzle your understandable frustration over minutes wasted cannot be sufficiently disguised. They justify their tardiness by pointing out that they texted you fifteen minutes after they were supposed to arrive, offering the defense that your phone buzzed with a running commentary of their delayed movements. “Hey, I’m at 72nd Street!” the late person will pound with unrepentant thumbs into a keypad. “I’ll be there in five minutes!” But any cursory consideration of Manhattan traffic patterns quickly leads to the facile conclusion that there is no way for even the most nimble mortal to get to the East Village bar you agreed to meet at in anywhere less than fifteen. You sit, nursing a drink, possibly ordering a supererogatory appetizer to ensure that you keep your table. It is, in short, a maddening predicament. If you have made an elaborate dinner for a few people, the late person keeps everyone sitting around the table as the meal gets cold.

The late person’s excuses are manifold and vastly creative and never entirely sufficient. Late people make you feel like a chump, trampling upon your cheery punctilious demeanor with the clueless rudeness of Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. While the dependably tardy person who is always ten minutes behind schedule can be easily contended with through the swift legerdemain of agreeing upon a meeting time ten minutes before the two of you arrive, the casually impertinent late person is the true malefactor. She claims to be busy but never seems to comprehend that you sacrificed time too, leaving early to ensure your timely arrival, perhaps persuading another party that you needed another day to get back on something as you race to the subway, sweat pouring down your brow, because you foolishly believed that respecting the late person’s time was important. As you wait in a restaurant, feeling the book you brought to pass the time droop from your fingers, looking at your phone and wondering how many minutes you should stay before bolting, and detecting the judgmental eyes of strangers poring over your solitary presence or a group of people glaring behind the host stand for you to leave, you wonder why you allowed yourself to fall for the ruse again.

Late people annoy me, probably more than they should. This may be an eccentric pet peeve. It may be the beginning of some cantankerous midlife period in which I will spend more time barking at adolescents to stop trespassing on my patch of grass. But as someone who tries to be sensitive and courteous about other people’s time, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in expecting others to show up when they say they will. We ding late people in just about every other circumstance. Ushers bar the tardy from entering a theatre after a show starts. Unless the late person is an important dignitary, there’s little chance of an airplane waiting for her presence on the tarmac. (On the other hand, I loved it when German Chancellor Angela Merkel bailed on meeting Putin last October because the Russian despot couldn’t be bothered to show.) A worker who does not show up to her job can be fired for repeat infringement. Why then is tardiness tolerated in social scenarios? We clearly want to honor a charming and brilliant person with character flaws, but are we giving up some of our dignity in doing so? Our culture frowns upon deadbeats. Credit bureaus exact harsh score-shaving penalties for those who cannot pay their bills on time. Why then should we give chronically unpunctual offenders a fair shake? Late people rob us of our hours and seem to be rubbing their hands with glee.

Diana DeLonzor, late in an altogether different sense, once suggested that the chronically tardy are not consciously trying to annoy those around them. Of course! Much like any idealist with a firm commitment to belief, late people regularly breach the very principles they preach. Surprisingly, there has been very little research into the late person’s psychological motivations, although the Wall Street Journal‘s Sumathi Reddy has helpfully compiled what we know about late people: they could be more susceptible to the planning fallacy, whereby they greatly underestimate the time needed to complete a project, or cannot break down the components of a common and not terribly difficult obligation such as meeting someone for a date to get a true assessment of how much time it will take. While we’re all capable of distraction, getting lost in imagination, and falling down time-sucking rabbit holes because of our curiosity, why can’t organizational commitment and optimistic wandering coexist in the same head? Even the cult director John Waters is a stickler for punctuality. One doesn’t have to be a cold corporate autocrat to understand that honoring other people’s time should be one of life’s first duties.

Psychology Today‘s Adoree Durayappah-Harrison offers the provocative suggestion that late people arrive at meetings when they do because they don’t want to be early. But this too seems a strange reason to pardon the late person. Isn’t arriving early a plus? You don’t have to walk into a meeting place right away. You can survey the surroundings, saunter around a new neighborhood, chat with a stranger, send a text, and perform countless other acts because you see time as something to be savored. Moreover, does the late person seriously believe that the punctual person always enjoys being early? Why should the late person get preferential treatment?

There’s obviously a Western bias to my plaints. In The Dance of Time, the sociologist Edward T. Hall studied how different cultures establish rhythm. He divided cultures into monochronic and polychronic. Monochronic societies, which would include most Western societies, are very much committed to performing one task a time and it is vital that a life schedule is not uprooted by too many interruptions. In M-time, time is a quantifiable commodity. But in polychronic cultures, people are committed to conducting many events at once so that they can have a greater involvement with people. These differences in how one spends time can cause international problems, not unlike the Merkel-Putin showdown referenced above. (In 1991, some behavioral economists proposed a Polychronic Attitude Index in an effort to map marketplaces.) Hall established these terms in 1983, but I’m not so sure his dichotomy holds up thirty years later in an age of multitasking and people glued to their phones. We all have somewhere to be going.

Patience is as a virtue, but it is more easily upheld after the other person has shown up. I’d like to be more forgiving of late people, but they never seem to be entirely forgiving of me. I am not asking for the trains to run on time like Mussolini. There are elements of the universe outside our control. When I interviewed the aforementioned Waters five years ago, he was slightly late and offered one of the most effusive and unnecessary apologies I have ever witnessed. Had the roles been reversed, I suspect that I would have been just as exuberantly contrite. But if it takes forty-five minutes to do something, why not schedule an hour just to be on the safe side? It is 7:31 AM as I type this sentence. I have given myself until 8:00 AM to finish this essay and it appears that not only will I complete it on time, but I will have some leftover minutes to peruse a few pages from one of the six books I’m now in the middle of reading or check in on a friend. If late people could only understand that one can be ambitious and liberated while keeping appointments, we wouldn’t have to tolerate the stings of their relentless absenteeism.

Cycles (FYE #3)

This week, we examine cycles. Are our lives and our culture locked within cycles? Are we aware of it? Should we be aware of it? Or is there a certain folly in paying too much attention? Our quest for answers has us talking with bike shop owners and a Finnegans Wake reading group. We reveal how Raiders of the Lost Ark caused two teenage boys to become consumed by a relentless cycle of remaking the movie they loved with limited cinematic resources. We also talk with Scottish novelist Ian Rankin about how he returned to Inspector Rebus and got caught up in cycles he couldn’t quite describe and Lesley Alderman, the author of The Book of Times, who shows us how being aware of time doesn’t necessarily preclude you from finding enticing new cycles of existence.


3a

Like Riding a Life

We begin our investigation into cycles by wandering around Brooklyn on a cold Saturday afternoon talking with various bike shop owners about how the cycles of life relate to their passion for bicycles. Our gratitude to Fulton Bikes, R&A Cycles, and Brooklyn Cycle Works for sharing their thoughts and feelings, which range from calmness to restrained anger. (Beginning to 4:11)


3b

Commodius Vicus of Recirculation

Every month, the Finnegans Wake Society of New York gets together in a Spring Street apartment and reads aloud a page of James Joyce’s cyclical masterpiece. And then they discuss the page, whatever theories they can find, for about two hours. Organizer Murray Gross tells us why it’s important to slow down. Other members tell us how they became unexpectedly married to the book. (4:11 to 10:09)


3c

Standing in Another Man’s Cycle

Are cycles a red herring? I spoke with the novelist Ian Rankin to get more answers. Rankin’s latest book, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, marks a surprise return to the Inspector Rebus series, which Rankin had closed out in 2007 with his 17th Rebus novel, Exit Music. Somehow Rebus eluded retirement and manged to cajole Malcolm Fox, the protagonist of Rankin’s new series, into the mix. This seemed as good a time as any to press Rankin on whether he’s caught in a pleasant cycle. Our side trips in this conversation include consideration of Anthony Powell, the A9 Motorway and its homicidal possibilities, Skyfall, 20th century policing instinct, and how men in their sixties get into fistfights. (10:09 to 40:15)


3d

Pardon Me, Do You Have the Time?

We meet Lesley Alderman, author of The Book of Times, a collection of time-related data that will make your more conscious of the clock than Christian Marclay. But we learn how being aware of the time doesn’t mean you can’t find enticing new cycles hiding behind the corners of your complex existence. (40:15 to 45:51)


4e

Raiders of the Lost Remake

It was 1982 and three twelve-year-olds in Mississippi decided to remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was before the Internet, before the movie had been released on VHS. These kids had to hustle. What they did not know was that their ambitious project would take up their next seven summers. They would grow up making this movie. We talk with Chris Strompolos, who starred as Indiana Jones in the remake, and Alan Eisenstock, author of Raiders, a new book documenting the remake. Was all the fun and youthful ingenuity a mask? Can a cycle of remaking beget a new cycle of remaking? (45:51 to end)


Photograph by Steven Sebring.

Loops for this program were provided by Psychotropic Circle, DextDee, and HMNN.

Follow Your Ears #3: Cycles (Download MP3)

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Christian Marclay’s The Clock

Wait in line for a few hours, saunter into a dark and expansive theater where you’ll be standing anywhere from five to forty-five minutes to take a seat (all depending upon how polite or mercenary you are), and settle onto one of the couches (partitioned in sets of three) once a stranger has had enough. But be careful with the way you spend your time. Because once you leave the area, whether for snack or bathroom break, there’s no coming back unless you stand in the snaking queue again.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock may favor the determined, but it’s something of a rigged game. Supply and demand is carefully calibrated by making the seats precious real estate. It’s a perfect laboratory for behavioral economist Dan Ariely to conduct new experiments. Yet the clips of people standing on train platforms or waiting in sordid rooms may strengthen your resolve to stay on your feet. Still, after a few hours, the impulse to slump into the next free seat only increases.

Inside the room, the projected images are recognizable and faintly exotic, liberated from cinematic sources both pop and obscure, and ineluctably locked into the very minute you are experiencing. At 3:00 PM, Woody Allen shows up for his appointment with Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite and the joke about Sorvino’s prostitute telling Allen that she has “a great sense of humor” after showing him a clock with two fornicating pigs gets a new context. Little changes with Harold Lloyd’s famous clock-hanging moment, but when Peter Parker is fired for delivering a pizza late in Spider-Man 2, his fate at the hands of spoiled materialists is crueler because we are more aware of the temporal qualities.

Then there are the cinematic moments in which one was never especially aware of the time in the original context, even when clocks were heavily involved. Cathryn Harrison throws an old woman’s alarm clock collection out the window in Louis Malle’s Black Moon, but did the actual time ever really matter? Patrick McGoohan secures the electropass watch to escape the Village in “Arrival,” but without the roaring white balloon or Number Two to taunt him, he could very well be confused with a disgruntled bureaucrat. Jack Nicholson’s droll wooing of Ann-Margaret as he sings “Go to the Mirror” in Ken Russell’s Tommy becomes less about seduction and more about a doctor using time as sparingly as possible. When we see Nicholson again in a clip from About Schmidt, waiting for the last moments of 5:00 PM to tick away on his last day in a drab and lonely office, I couldn’t help but wonder if his fixation on time caused him to lose Ann-Margaret.

I had feared that The Clock would be a Wagnerian bauble: a novelty requiring only time and fortitude to embrace its contextual charms. But I discovered that Marclay’s massive opus tinkered not only with my passion for cinema, but upon my temporal prejudices. I experienced an undeniable joy for kitsch upon witnessing a preposterous fight scene from MacGyver and realized that my reverence for a certain period of 1980s cinema was more bountiful than expected. Yet I felt somewhat saddened when the film denied me clips of people fleeing the workplace after 5PM. I have always felt that there was something romantic about people liberated from their daily capitalist commitments to live out the true joys of their lives, but I didn’t feel The Clock properly acknowledged it. We do, however, see a moribund commuting moment on a packed subway. And I did notice that Marclay included a sad quotidian moment from Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing. So clearly the assumptive fault is mine.

The Clock isn’t just about exposing our our enslavement to time. There is an inescapable physical component to this endurance test. If you are with friends, you may end up leapfrogging from couch to couch, slowly traveling back to your dear companions initially stranded in the IKEA archipelago. Because you are among an artistically sensitive crowd, you may find yourself throwing your dark coat over your head with a theatrical whoosh (as I did) to stub out the searing light from your phone as you text your coordinates to the people you came with, hoping that they will find you later. I witnessed some couples squeezing closer together, and I could suss out the degree to which friends wanted to be together by the way they raced to seating that had just opened up. But when a clip from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom played, stretching my mild voyeurism onto the discomfiting canvas of Carl Boehm’s hungry and sociopathic eyes, I become consumed by tremendous guilt in watching other people. If cinema was a communal experience, why should I have to be punished for it? Was there something pornographic in being curious about others? Or was The Clock something of an impetuous tot stomping its feet for attention?

I did feel that The Clock was very much a pleasant narcotic that was difficult for me to resist, yet these social concerns recalled Jason Rohrer’s Passage, a sidescrolling video game art project which confronts the manner in which you parcel out your life and pits individual ambition against love and communion. After nearly five hours inside Marclay’s fish tank, I was confident that I could spend at least four more, despite the fact that I had not slept much. But my companions had maxed out and I did not wish to abandon them.

We went to dinner. I had no desire to look at the time.