There is a particular kind of latecomer who is not chaotic but precise. Not vaguely late — exactly late. A quarter of an hour, every single time, as though they had set an alarm to guarantee it.
I have worked with one of these people, and you probably have too.
Writing in the Financial Times, James Max proposes a remedy: a universal tariff for wasted time, a sort of WaitPay, under which friends get five minutes' grace, a quarter of an hour costs you the coffees, and half an hour buys lunch. Companies, he suggests, would get no indulgence whatsoever.
Lateness is a status claim
Being late is rarely about the traffic. It is a small, deniable assertion that your time carries a higher price than the time of whoever is sitting in the café checking their phone. Nobody is fifteen minutes late to a job interview. People are late to things where they hold the whip hand: the consultant to the client, the senior manager to the team meeting, the friend who knows perfectly well you will wait because you always do.
The apology is part of the machinery rather than a correction to it. It converts an imposition into a favour graciously forgiven, which is a lovely trick if you can pull it off, and the reliably late have become very good at it indeed. Reprimanding someone for it feels socially costly — petty, even — so we absorb the loss and say it's fine. It isn't fine. It's just cheaper than the row.
The scale of the asymmetry
What makes the WaitPay proposal interesting is that it takes a logic we apply ruthlessly in one direction and turns it round. Miss a payment and the penalty is automatic. Overstay in a car park and a camera finds you within the fortnight. File a tax return late and a fine is already waiting with your name on it. The apparatus for charging individuals for lost institutional time is exquisitely engineered.
The apparatus for the reverse does not exist — and the reverse is enormous. The National Audit Office calculated that callers to HMRC spent the equivalent of nearly 800 years on hold in a single year, with more than half of all calls going unanswered entirely. On the railways, one analysis of the year to May 2026 put passenger time lost to delays and cancellations at close to 42 million hours. Those are not rounding errors. They are a vast, silent transfer of value from the many to the few, conducted entirely through hold music.
Of course WaitPay will never happen
We already have a miniature version of this: Delay Repay refunds a slice of your ticket if the train is late enough, which sounds like justice until you notice its shape: you must claim it, within a window, up to a cap, from a company that has priced the exercise carefully. It compensates for the fare, not for the missed bedtime story or the collapsed afternoon.
That is the giveaway. Penalties flow towards whoever can enforce them, and enforcement is a function of power, not of fairness. Institutions can dock your wages, charge you interest and send you letters in red ink. You can leave a one-star review.
