notes on tardiness
As most of my friends and colleagues know, punctuality is a big deal for me. I try to recognize that I’m generally a bit more anal about it than most, and give people some leeway, but it still upsets me fairly regularly.
Two manifestations of tardiness irritate me more than the rest; the “power play” and the “starbucks.”
The power play is when the offending party excuses their lateness by simply referencing their busy schedule or some similarly trivial aspect of their life. This circumstance is especially infuriating because the sub-text is so very clear. This person is actually saying, perhaps not in so many words, that the trivial minutia of their daily schedule takes precedent over anything that you might have had scheduled. This is, of course, insulting, absurd, and the pinnacle of passive aggressive moves.
The Starbucks is a similar variant in which the offending party is late to a meeting—usually a morning meeting—and walks in sipping a freshly purchased cup of coffee, or a muffin, or whatever. In this instance the person is actually communicating that the coffee is more important than your time. This is outrageous.
