Woman Tricks ‘Chronically Late Friend’ to Be on Time, but Plan Backfires

Most people have that one friend who’s always running behind schedule – whether it be 15 minutes or 45.

While occasional tardiness is forgivable, consistent lateness can start to chip away at even the strongest friendships.

For one Reddit user, the chronic lateness of one of their friends was becoming a source of frustration and conflict – especially considering it happened “90% of the time.”

According to the post, “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.”

After one too many disrupted plans, the woman decided to gently confront her friend a few months ago and request a better system.

The user asked her friend to start texting when she was about to leave the house, so they could meet at the same time.

“She’s been doing that, which has been helpful,” the user acknowledges, noting that this did improve things to an extent.

But even with this adjustment, the chronic lateness continued. “It doesn’t change the fact that she still has to show up later than the time we agreed to,” the woman writes, adding that this behavior sometimes forces them to push back other plans.

Tired of juggling her own schedule around someone else’s habits, the Reddit user decided to test out a popular piece of advice seen online: tell the chronically late person 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,” she explains. The plan worked – sort of.

“My friend actually got there at 7 for the first time ever,” she writes. However, when the friend arrived and noticed she was alone, the situation took a turn for the worse.

“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,'” the poster recalls.

“She 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,” she adds.

A follow-up text made things worse: the friend accused the poster of being “passive aggressive and childish.”

Commenters quickly came to the original poster’s defense, with one writing: “People who are chronically late lack respect for everyone else’s time, so the fact that OP’s friend chose to respond like this, on top of the chronic lateness, suggests that maybe they’re not the greatest friend ever.”

At the same time, others took the friend’s side, pointing out, “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.”

The Reddit user, however, was surprised by the outcome, noting, “I feel like common advice of how to handle late friends completely blew up in my face.”