Your Schedule? That’s Where Your Promises Go.
A friend, Jason, told me he waited at a restaurant this morning for over an hour because his friend “promised” to meet him there at 9 AM. The friend never showed, and didn’t email or text to say he wasn’t coming. I’ve heard this before from Jason, and it’s clear to me that his friend does not use a schedule to keep track of his appointments. Maybe Jason’s friend doesn’t consider their breakfast-date an “appointment”. Or maybe he treats all his appointments that way: I assume that I will remember, or even if I don’t remember, it doesn’t matter much.
Here’s an extreme example of that kind of thinking – The New Yorker reported (April 17, 2017, page 23) that Martin Shkreli probably doesn’t pay much attention to a schedule either:
“It was almost 9 P.M. when Shkreli drained his second glass of beer. He suddenly looked alert, remembering that he had received a jury-duty summons. He looked at his phone and said, “S**t, I might have missed it. What day is it?””
Wow. This is not someone you’d want to invite over to dinner. The soufflé would likely have to be reheated and served with a side of bacon for the next morning’s breakfast.
No-shows happen to Jason a lot – probably because Jason doesn’t use a schedule either. His life is unusually simple: a ride to work in the morning, the day at work, then home to dinner, maybe a bike ride, then TV and to bed. He lives pretty much one-day-at-a-time, and if something other than bike-riding and TV is supposed to happen in the evening, he remembers it, because it’s “special”. Weekends can be more complicated – he might meet his father, or go to visit nearby relatives, or make plans with friends. The dates and times for get-togethers with family members are very reliable – everybody communicates by email about the specifics of each event, so there are few surprises. Appointments made with his friends, however, are reliable only half the time.
What is so hard about using a schedule to make note of appointments or other agreements? I’m not sure, because I rely on my schedule to tell me where to be and when – every single appointment goes on my calendar, and once or twice a week I fill in the spaces between them with things from my “Do-Due List“. But that’s because I have reached a “certain age” where I have learned that my memory is not to be trusted. Not everyone has a complex life, and some weeks we may not need the schedule as much as others. But how can we count on keeping our word when we don’t write it down in a place we will check – and update – every day?
The question for Jason now, however, is, How long am I going to maintain a relationship with people who can’t be counted on to show up at the promised time and place? How many times am I willing to be stood up and left waiting before I assign you a reputation as Unreliable? I suspect Jason has more patience than most of us. He certainly has more than I do.
