Always Late

"I'm late, I'm late! For a very important date! No time to say 'hello, goodbye', I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!"

— The White Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland

On one side of the coin, there are characters who are the very embodiments of punctuality. They are always on time, for everything, no matter what. Their time management skills are unrivaled. They may even do things or arrive at places earlier than normal or expected.

On the other side of the coin...you have these characters. They appear late for just about every event, meeting, and party under the sun, whether it's due to being Lazy Bums, having poor time management, not being the best at following directions, or having something prevent them from getting to where they need to go. This can cause them to butt heads with characters who are more punctual in nature, as well as face consequences from teachers, bosses at work, and the like — some dire in nature, like being fired or getting detention.

Late for School, as well as Toast of Tardiness, are school-specific subtropes. For characters who are always late but have Time Travel powers to counteract their tardiness, see Fantastic Time Management. Characters who are unpunctual may be Ridiculous Procrastinators.

Compare Punctuality Is for Peasants, in which somebody is arrogantly late to spite those who they consider beneath them. Polar opposite of the Schedule Fanatic as well as the Creature of Habit. Also contrast Clock King, whose entire stock-in-trade is punctuality.

As this is Truth in Television and is very common, No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Azumanga Daioh: Yukari Tanizaki, despite being a teacher who despises laziness from her students, is so lazy and immature herself that she frequently shows up late to her own class. Usually it's because of her poor sleep schedule, preferring to doze off rather than get up on time, while other times it might be due to things like showing up to the wrong class or getting stuck in line for the newest PlayStation game. Eventually, her friend and coworker Nyamo starts driving her to school, allowing her to start showing up on time more often.
• Dragon Ball: Goku has a bad habit of only being able to reach the battlefield in time to save his friends from being utterly annihilated.
• Girls und Panzer: Mako Reizei is Not a Morning Person, often staggering into school late and groggy. Discipline Committee head Midoriko Sono has a bookful of tardy slips on Reizei, which could jeopardize her advancement to the next grade. By itself, this isn't enough to motivate Reizei out of her truculence, but having her grandmother find out is a potent motivator.
• Iino from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War has a habit of showing up to student council meetings late due to also having to run her rounds for the public morals committee. As a result, she tends to walk in on whatever wackiness is going on mid-event without context, leading her to come to some very interesting conclusions about what's going on.
• One-Punch Man: Saitama is forever showing up late to one-shot the giant monsters that have been laying waste to the city, mostly as a Drama-Preserving Handicap.
• Ryoga of Ranma ½ constantly shows up days late for events on account of getting hopelessly lost on the way. A key incident in his backstory is that he missed a fight with Ranma on account of getting lost and arriving three days late.
• Sailor Moon: Usagi Tsukino/Sailor Moon is often notoriously late for school, so much so that running late is her Establishing Character Moment. Instances where she gets to school on time or early, such as in the manga, after remembering she was Princess Serenity, or in the original anime's "Usagi's Disaster: Beware the Clock of Confusion" when she and others are suffering from magical Clock Tampering, are treated as O.O.C. Is Serious Business.
• In Tokyo Mew Mew, Ichigo is often seen running late, whether it's to school, to work, or it's to a date with Aoyama. In the case of the latter, he ends up waiting for hours in the rain but still manages to forgive Ichigo (in part because he knows she's a Magical Girl). This happens less often in the anime reboot, but events such as the last example mentioned occur.

Asian Animation

• Catch! Teenieping: Hurryping is a Teenieping who always believes he is late for everything. As such, he has the power to make other people or other Teeniepings move quickly, as they become afraid of being late.

Comic Books

• The Flash: Despite his Super-Speed, Barry Allen is often late to his dates with Iris West, due to having to stop to deal with criminals along the way.
• In the original New Warriors, Speedball was habitually late to team gatherings. It didn't help that the others lived around NYC while he lived in Connecticut.

Films — Animation

• Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses: Princess Genevieve arrives late to everything; breakfast, meeting the duchess, you name it. The epilogue shows her finally on time for something; her wedding.

Films — Live-Action

• Four Weddings and a Funeral: Charles is late to the first three weddings shown in the movie (for the first one, he's the best man, while for the third, it's the woman he's in love with who's marrying someone else). For his own wedding, his friends and brother make sure he's on time by putting several alarm clocks in his room that all go off loudly, and then lying about what time it really is until they're actually at the church.
• Jingle All the Way: Howard is always late for his son Jamie's karate class due to spending too much time at work. Jamie starts to grow mad at Howard as a result.
• Spider-Man 2: Due to struggling to balance his crime-fighting duties as Spider-Man with his everyday life, Peter Parker is frequently late for things:
  • He shows up late for his pizza delivery job (which his boss says is a constant issue) and gets fired when he's unable to fulfill the restaurant's 29-minute guarantee because of it.
  • On the way to one of his college classes, he bumps into Curt Connors, the professor teaching the class, who tells him that said class is already over and that he has a paper that's still overdue.
  • The usher at Mary Jane's play prevents him from entering after the doors are closed to "maintain the illusion". Mary Jane later chews Peter out for being the only person she knows that hasn't shown up even once.
  • His landlord, Mr. Ditkovich, constantly hounds him for being late on paying the rent.

Literature

• In the Alcatraz Series, Grandpa Leavenworth Smedry's talent is that he's always late; this has led to him being late for his own death on several occasions.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: In the original book, The White Rabbit is often in a rush to get places and has a lack of punctuality, indicated by the pocket watch he always carries with him. This carries over into many adaptations of the book, as well.
• In Alexandra Marinina's Anastasia Kamenskaya series, Anastasia's Patient Childhood Love Interest and eventual husband, Absent-Minded Professor Alexey Chistyakov, never arrives on time for any appointment. He always gets confused between similarly-named streets, districts, and subway stations, and even if he definitely remembers the address (such as that of his wife's workplace, Moscow Criminal Investigation Department), he can never figure out how long it would take him to get there, forgetting to consider traffic jams and the waiting time at stations.
• The Blue-Nosed Witch: Blanche is always late for Scurry 13's midnight flights for one reason or another. It's one of the reasons that Minnie Max, one of the witches, thinks she's too young to be part of the scurry and should be sent back to Scurry 2 1/2. On Halloween she and her friend Josephine both set her alarm clock so she'll get up early, but she ends up awake too early and, after spending the night trick-or-treating with other children, is almost late anyways.
• Franklin: One story establishes that Franklin is "slow, even for a turtle", i.e. he dawdles a lot. Thus, he often shows up late to his friends' activities, to the point where they get bored and leave.
• How to Tell Time by Jane Werner Watson is one in a long-running series of children's books known as Little Golden Books. Tommy O'Toole is called "Tommy Too-Late" by his family because he's always late getting up, always late for breakfast, and almost always late for school. They set up a sundial so the sun can cast a shadow at a certain spot when it's time for him to come in, and then they try lighting a candle with marks on the sides to show him when it's bedtime. When Tommy is still late for everything, his father gives him a watch and teaches him how to tell time. This works, and at the end of the story, his family is calling him "Tommy On-Time". The book's front cover had a picture of a watch with movable hands.
• Mr. Men: Little Miss Late gets her name from the fact that she's late for everything, whether it comes to celebrating Christmas in January or doing spring cleaning in the summer. This becomes a problem when she tries to get a job, as she keeps showing up or fulfilling orders hours later. However, she finds a solution when she becomes Mr. Lazy's cook; since he sleeps all the time, she can show up in the afternoon.
• The Kangaroo of "The Kangaroo Chronicles" by Marc-Uwe Kling is notoriously unpunctual when having appointments with Marc-Uwe, which is something that over the course of the first two books drives them to a lot of arguments.
• It's mentioned in the book The Queen's Bracelet that Sesame and Maddie often get into spats over Maddie's lateness.
• In the kids' book Tiddler, the eponymous young fish is always late for school due to his habit of dawdling and his small size. He often makes up bizarre stories as excuses for his lateness, so the one time his story is true, the teacher doesn't believe him.
• Van Manderpootz: Dixon Wells is chronically late, so much so that his father almost has a heart attack after Dixon seemingly arrives at the office before him (in fact, Dixon simply hasn't left the office since the day before).

Live-Action TV

• The Brittas Empire: It's a Running Gag that Colin never gets to meetings on time, usually because he has befallen yet another incident that has resulted in injury to him.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Jake Peralta's tendency to show up late for work puts him in conflict with Captain Holt, on top of his goofy attitude and lack of maturity. While the fact that he is such a good detective stops him from getting fired, Holt points out that these tendencies could keep him from advancing in his career.
  Jake: (runs in) I'm here! I'm here, I'm here. You can start the meeting now.
• Daisy Jones & The Six: Daisy is so notoriously tardy, The Six's manager Rod routinely tells her sound checks are an hour earlier than they are. The band refers to this as "Daisy Standard Time."
• The Flash (2014): Prior to becoming a speedster, Barry Allen is infamous for his lack of punctuality. After becoming The Flash, he continues arriving late for things because, as he tells Oliver, his super-tardiness is so bad it neutralizes his super speed.
  Captain Singh: What was it this time, Mr. Allen? Did you forget to set your alarm clock? Before your answer, I should remind you the excuse you gave last time was "car trouble." Wanna know why that was particularly memorable?
  Barry: I do not own a car.
• House of Anubis: As a Running Gag in the first two seasons, Nina and Fabian would both often be scrambling into class late due to being held up by the mystery. They would both have to come up with excuses, with Nina apologizing to French-class professor Mrs. Andrews in perfect French at one point (impressing her enough to let them pass) and Fabian apologizing for forgetting his brilliant excuse in another instance when he was struck with a memory curse. For Nina in particular, her bad timing even extended to her being two weeks late for her first day of school — something that would cost her a lot of grief.
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Being late is a hallmark trait of main character Midge, usually as a result of her taking great pains to pick the right outfit for whatever occasion she happens to be running late to.
• The Mighty Boosh episode "Fountain of Youth" makes a Running Gag out of the mighty warrior Banoo arriving at the wrong time for everything. At the start of the episode, he arrives late to the amulet-gifting ceremony, causing the MacGuffin amulet to be given to the shaman Naboo by mistake. In the end, he appears after the Villain of the Week has already been defeated, and when the king tells him it's 4 o'clock, he exclaims "Oh shit! I need to pick up the kids!"
• Outnumbered: Amongst her many, many other issues, Sue's long-suffering friend Jane is constantly late and unreliable, thanks to her miserable marriage (ending in husband eventually leaving her and her getting a string of equally bad boyfriends), along with all her other poor luck wrecking her ability to balance and manage her life. Whilst sympathetic, her inability to ever be on time for commitments (including those involving her daughter Alexa) does still create more problems for Sue and Pete. At one point Sue attempts to work around the issue by telling Jane the time she needs her to arrive is half an hour earlier than it actually is, and Jane still doesn't arrive until nearly two hours later.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Played for Drama in "Hollow Pursuits", in which a newbie engineer named Reg Barclay is always late for work due to a combination of his paralysing shyness and his habit of going onto the holodeck as a coping mechanism for said shyness.

Music

• The children's song "Bop Shoo Wop" mentions that the singer's dog Spot is never on time because he always wears roller-skates everywhere and is bad at using them.
• Havalina Rail Co.: "That Bohemian Music" (Dave Maust's contribution to the "Space, Love and Bullfighting Suite") includes a monologue about life in a modern-day abbey. Fernando is frequently late to morning prayers because he holds prayer vigils by himself in the cloister very late at night. The narrator, who has a room overlooking the cloister, encourages the other monks to be more forgiving, without giving away Fernando's secret.
  And I see Fernando down there sometimes, but never during the day. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I see him in the cloister, at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes, he lays there prostrate in the grass, where it's all wet. He may even lay there an hour or two, and when he's finished he usually eats a candy bar. At morning prayers, everyone complains, saying, "Fernando is always late." They look at their Casios, and they shake their heads. And I say, "Hey, guys, give Fernando some grace. He's probably listening to that Bohemian music."
• Velvet Underground's song "I'm Waiting for the Man" describes the eponymous drug dealer as "never early, he's always late" in the third verse.
  First thing you learn is that you always got to wait.
• "Always Late," from Utopia's Beatles pastiche album, Deface the Music, is the comic, Ringo-esque lament of a man who's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Among other things, he tries to mollify his fed-up wife by suggesting an "anniversary drive," only to learn their anniversary was yesterday. Cue the sound of shattering glass.

Theatre

• In The Sound of Music, the nuns cite this fact about Maria as one of the many signs that she's too free-spirited for the strict order of convent life: "She's always late for chapel/But her penitence is real/She's always late for everything/Except for every meal."

Video Games

• Doki Doki Literature Club!: The main protagonist's childhood friend and potential love interest Sayori often sleeps in and is usually late for school. Sayori later confesses to the protagonist that she suffers from depression hence why she is frequently late for school. Because of her depression, Sayori often is unable to think of a good reason to get out of bed each morning. In act 4 of the game however, Sayori mentions that she has been waking up on time lately, implying that her depression has been alleviated to some degree.
• WarioWare: Mona, who has new jobs every game, has the consistent trait of rarely making it there on time. Usually, she leaves late and goes to extreme measures to get places on time. In Gold, she's shopping for a party instead of working but spends so long at the clothing store that she's almost late to her own party.

Web Original

• A Scotsman in Egypt: In chapter 63, Captain Allan is described as having been late his entire life, and vowing that this time he won't be. The battle is a stupendously costly victory, and he orders Let Us Never Speak of This Again.
  Captain Allan had been late all his life.
  He was born late, during a Winter storm in which his mother died. He walked and talked later than all his brothers, he was slower to learn, his body changed from a boy to a man long after his friends had entered manhood. He joined the army and was a slow learner even there, struggling with discipline, with formations and marching, rank and training.
  But slowly, surely he had made his way, a stubborn, sluggish push upwards through the ranks based more on pure bloody-mindedness than any real skill or potential. He'd become a Captain in the Army and found his place in the world at last.
  But he was still late.
  When General Micheil Broune had been tasked with protecting the border from the Byzantines, he'd sent out a call for all available artillery units that could be spared to be brought under his command. [...] They'd been so delayed on their journey by breakdowns, dysentery and appeals for help from local farmers that they'd missed Micheil's great victory on the border.
  But the army had continued on towards Nicaea, which was the personal city and playground of the Byzantium Prince Asemopoulos, and in Allan's mind, dreams of a last-minute arrival that turned the tide of battle their way rang through his head. He'd been late all of his life, but he intended to see to it that he WOULD arrive on time, this time.

Western Animation

• Free Willy: Jesse frequently comes late to his job at the Misty Island Oceanic Reserve due to playing with Willy for too long during the mornings.
• Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids: In "Tom Time", a boy named Tom is always late for everything like school and meal times. The reason why Tom is always late when he was a baby he accidentally sneezed his brain out into the sloth cage in the zoo. His mother mistakes a baby sloth for Tom's brain and puts it back in his head. One day a news report tells everybody that the world will explode and they have to go to a rocket ship by tomorrow with one catch, don't be late. Tom's parents had gotten themselves ready to evacuate but he overslept. He was forced to get ready while his parents went to the rocket. It was too late when Tom arrived at the shuttle station and was stranded on Earth as it explodes.
• LarryBoy: The Cartoon Adventures: In "Larryboy and the Angry Eyebrows", Larryboy has always been late to Buk Koy's superhero class four times. Buk Koy yells at Larryboy for being late but remembers to let go of his anger.
• The Loud House: Lincoln is usually the last one out of all his siblings to be ready in the morning, as shown in "Predict Ability" and "Rita Her Rights", although how this trait is shown depends on the writer.
• Nate Is Late: The whole premise of the show is that protagonists Nate and Malika always end up late at school due to running into outlandish adventures on their way there.
• Rocko's Modern Life: In "Commuted Sentence", Rocko's car gets impounded when Rocko accidentally parks in a red zone, and as a result, he has to resort to having to use public transportation to get to his job at Kind-of-A-Lot-O-Comics and keeps arriving late. Eventually, Mr. Smitty fires Rocko, but fortunately, a police officer overhears of Rocko's plight and gives him a job as a tow truck driver. It turns out everyone in O-Town parks illegally, but the first car Rocko comes across is Mr. Smitty's.
• Theodore Tugboat: In "Theodore in the Middle", George makes an official complaint to the Dispatcher that Emily is always late to the morning work meeting, bringing up that her lateness delays the meeting and causes delays for the visiting ships who needs the tugboats' help. This results in Emily getting a red mark in the Great Tugboat Book and a feud between her and George that lasts for the whole episode.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • The conflict of "Thomas and the Guard" is set off when Henry keeps showing up late in bringing Thomas' passengers to Elsbridge Station. Thomas asks Annie and Clarabel how he is expected to run his branch line properly because of this, accusing Henry of being lazy and not realizing how much the Fat Controller depends on him. When Henry does finally arrive, Thomas is in such a hurry to make up for lost time that he leaves Elsbridge Station before his guard can board Clarabel.
  • In "The Grand Opening", Skarloey keeps arriving at his destinations late due to his extra work taking up his time. First, he's late to Sir Topham Hatt's announcement, which Sir Topham Hatt chides him for. Then, he's the last of the engines to arrive at the new station. However, the latter turns out to be a good thing; Sir Topham Hatt and Lady Hatt are on their way to the station in a hot air balloon when said balloon runs out of hot air and crash-lands in a tree. Skarloey wastes no time in rescuing them and taking them to the station, where he is praised as a hero.

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