Chronically Late

When I was growing up, my mother had a friend I'll call Dan.

Dan had children around the same ages as my brother, my sister, and me, so our families spent quite a bit of time together. The kids got along. The adults were friends. Everything worked pretty well.

Except for one thing.

Dan was late.

Not occasionally late. Not “traffic was bad” late. Not “I couldn't find my keys” late.

Chronically late.

If you told Dan something started at noon, you could reasonably expect him sometime around 1:00.

This was apparently not a character flaw in Dan's mind. It was simply the way the universe operated. Events had official start times, and then they had Dan Standard Time.

Dan also had a flair for drama and what today we'd probably call a touch of Main Character Syndrome. His arrival was rarely an unnoticed event.

Normally, that was merely annoying.

Then my mother decided to throw my little sister a surprise birthday party.

The plan was simple.

My sister would be away from the house. Everyone was told to arrive at 2:00 p.m. She would return around 2:30. That gave everyone half an hour to arrive, get settled, hide, and prepare to yell SURPRISE when she walked through the door.

There was only one problem.

Dan.

My mother knew exactly what would happen if she told him the party started at 2:00.

He would arrive at 3:00.

He would miss the surprise.

And then his late arrival would become an event of its own.

So my mother did something that would probably make a fantastic post on Reddit's AITA thread today.

She lied to him.

But first, she conducted reconnaissance.

My brother and I checked with Dan's kids. Did they want to be there for the actual surprise?

Absolutely.

Excellent.

My mother therefore informed Dan that the party started at 1:00 p.m.

This was not an estimate.

It was not a typo.

It was a calculated one-hour adjustment for Dan Standard Time.

And then we waited.

One o'clock came.

No Dan.

1:15.

No Dan.

1:30.

Still no Dan.

Two o'clock arrived, which was when everybody else had actually been invited.

People showed up.

Still no Dan.

Finally, at 2:07 p.m., Dan arrived.

He was an hour and seven minutes late.

Which made him...

seven minutes late.

He walked in apparently expecting that he'd already missed the big moment.

Instead, we greeted him with:

“Good! You're just in time. She'll be here in a few minutes.”

Everyone hid.

My sister came home.

SURPRISE!

It worked perfectly.

Dan's kids got to participate. My sister got her surprise. Nobody wandered through the door half an hour afterward and inadvertently created a second act.

It was a wonderful party.

There was, however, one person who wasn't happy.

Dan.

Afterward, he discovered that my mother had deliberately told him the wrong time.

And he was angry.

She had lied to him.

My mother's defense was beautifully simple:

“If I'd told you the real time, you would have been late.”

And here's the part that has stuck with me all these years.

She wasn't speculating.

She had told him 1:00.

He arrived at 2:07.

Had she told him the real arrival time of 2:00, his own behavior strongly suggested that he would have wandered in sometime after my sister had already arrived.

My mother didn't cure his lateness.

She didn't argue with him about it.

She didn't lecture him about respecting other people's time.

She simply accounted for it.

She treated his chronic lateness almost like a known error in a measuring instrument:

Observed time = Dan Standard Time + approximately one hour.

Apply correction factor.

Proceed with birthday party.

More than forty years later, I recently heard an Am I the Asshole story about someone doing essentially the same thing to a chronically late friend. The friend discovered the deception and became furious.

And suddenly I was a kid again, watching my mother's little social experiment work with almost laboratory precision.

Which leaves me with the same question Reddit was arguing about:

Was my mother wrong to lie about the time?

Or, once someone has demonstrated repeatedly that they won't respect the time you give them, are you justified in giving them the time that will actually get them there when you need them?

I know what my mother thought.

And 2:07 p.m. made a pretty compelling argument on her behalf.