If everyone else is early, is the last person to arrive late?

[Elphaba]

My MIL abides by this rule and it drives me crazy even though Fiyero and I are never the last to arrive - BIL is! Fiyero takes after FIL and always wants to leave way before we actually need to (which I don't mind) so we're usually early by 10-15 min. BIL on the other hand, some how avoided getting the severe form of this trait but is still punctual and usually arrives on time or at most 5min early. This means that when we have a family dinner MIL and FIL arrive ~20min early, Fiyero and I get there 5-10 min later and MIL sits there grumping to me about how BIL is "late" until he arrives 2min before the time we said we were meeting.  And after he gets there it's always "I was beginning to think you weren't coming!"

I have tried several different tactics to impress upon her (nicely) that BIL isn't late but it doesn't seem to work. She's got it in her head that he's a "late person" and that's that. It also really gets me that she'll make a reservation for X:00 but they still arrive 20 min early and see nothing wrong with wanting to be seated, but that's for another thread I guess.

[doodlemor]

As a person who tends to be precise and literal, I would find these early people who scold others very annoying.

Many years ago I had a friend who was always earlier that the time she said she would be.  Although she was very pleasant about it, I felt strange to do my final preparations with her waiting.  After a few instances of this, when she would tell me the time she was coming. I started saying something like........

Now is this "Cathytime" that you are telling me, or is it Eastern Standard Time.  She *got it* right away, and the problem was solved.

[Last_Dance]

I used to be extremely paranoid about arriving on time, especially because I often had to rely on public transport. This usually meant that I'd be the first to arrive, but I never thought for a second to scold everybody else who arrived after me, especially for "being late".

I think it was extremely rude of them to treat you that way. You agreed to arrive at a certain time and stuck to that.

[camlan]

In a situation like this, my reply to complaints about my being late would be, "Did the meeting time get changed? No one told me."  I would not apologize for being early to the stated meeting time, no matter how long the others had been waiting.