No, I don’t think that is an accurate summary, but that’s on me for leaving out the key piece: I apply very different standards to myself vs others. If I am late, I know all the things I counterfactually could have done to instead be on time but didn’t. When I tell others the story of why I’m late, it usually feels like an excuse I don’t quite believe. When others are (occasionally) late, I too am curious to hear their stories.
When someone (in a friendship context) is chronically late, you learn to expect it and route around it, whether they have a story or not, and whether the story is entertaining or believable or not. It’s not a big deal because you’ve established that expectation. But I’m never going to ask that friend to drive me to the airport.
When someone (in a casual or friendly context) is actively talking about planning and time, and you know they’re being unrealistically optimistic but they don’t want to hear it, then from then on you know not to believe their stories on why they’re late. They’re late because they’re not interested in planning to be on time. The story is not evidence of the real ‘why’. Whether or not this is fine is entirely dependent on context. In some cultures, it’s expected to be late to things, sometimes even hours late, and being on time could actually be a problem because everyone else won’t be ready. In others, being early is fine but being late is unacceptable—a lot of structured social activities, like team sports or many kinds of classes, are like this. In some cases both are seen as bad—I’ve known a few people (all of German descent, TINACBNIEAC) who would literally drive to the corner and wait in their cars, ideally just out of sight, until 1-2 minutes before they were ‘supposed’ to arrive, so as to get to the door pretty much literally as the clock changed to the ‘right’ time.
When someone (in a business context) is chronically or unapologetically late, it’s potentially but not unambiguously some combination of rude, disrespectful, counterproductive, and wasteful. If it’s because they had back to back meetings and one ran over, or they needed to use the bathroom in between, or they’re having technical difficulties, or some urgent personal matter came up, no problem! But you’re supposed to take 10 seconds to send a message letting people know, and if you can but don’t, that’s a problem. If it’s some sort of (even inadvertent) power move, because they don’t care about your time, that might be something you just have to deal with from your boss or a client, but it is always frustrating.
I think there’s a useful point here, though I’m not sure the framing makes it clear what you want readers to take away from it.
Relevant personal anecdote: Over the past few years I’ve had the pleasure of visiting 38 US national parks, and even small differences in accessibility seem to greatly alter the makeup and mindset of the visiting population. For example, Zion and Canyonlands are not so far apart or so different in absolute terms. But, in Zion, which is more readily reachable from major highways and cities, many of the guests show up with no plan or gear, seem to think it’s acceptable to carve games of tic tac toe into stones, and need signs warning them that squirrels will bite you if you try to feed and pet them. Canyonlands provides a lot less handholding, because most of the people who choose to go there do so more deliberately, with at least marginally more understanding of what they’re getting into. None of these are anywhere near the level of preparation and skill you’d need to survive in a real wilderness, of course, but I certainly found it striking how the visitors to two different parks in the same state have such different expectations/needs for how sanitized they want their experience of ‘nature’ to be.