Tardiness is never a good look, even if you’re the birthday girl.

If you can help it, you should never make your friends wait. Maybe you have more bandwidth with them and room for error than you do at work, but it’s still never nice to disrespect someone’s time. Because that’s what it is, disrespect. You think your time is more valuable than theirs, so you waste it. It’s one thing if a genuine error causes you to be late, but it’s another thing to just assume that the world will bend to your lateness. Maybe you have a friend like that, and you’ve learned to run on their sense of time. But that isn’t fun, nor is it a mark of a healthy friendship. You should be able to set boundaries with each other without hurting feelings. And respect for time is a huge thing. 

It’s also so annoying to be kept waiting when you’re hungry. When you’ve planned to have a meal at a certain time, and then that meal doesn’t come, it can be devastating. Your body was expecting to be fed, and when it doesn’t get what it wants, it has a way of revolting against you. It often causes the sensation known as «hanger.» You’re so hungry that you’ve become angry, and you cannot make good decisions when you’re hangry. It can cause even the most solid of friendships to become tense. You can snap when you don’t mean to, when all you need is a bite of a hamburger to turn things around.