Is My Pizza Late?

How would you answer if I asked you: “Is my pizza late?”

You might ask me how long I’ve been waiting. I tell you it’s been 35 minutes. So what’s the answer?

Hopefully, you’re thinking that you still don’t have enough information, because that would be correct. The next question should probably be something like: “How long did they tell you it was going to take when you ordered it?”

If they said 25 minutes, then yeah, it’s late. If they said 45 minutes, then it’s not. And if they didn’t say, then it isn’t late.

Now, if they didn’t say, that’s its own issue and they could probably improve their communication. But it still doesn’t make the pizza late. Of course, there’s an amount of time that a pizza could take that would likely be “late” even without a clear expectation upfront. If you ordered 3 hours ago, that’s probably late. But how about an hour? On a busy Friday night? The point is that without clear expectations, there’s a wider range of reasonable disagreement over what “late” is.

Which also means you have a bigger chance of being the jerk if you accuse your delivery driver of being late when the pizza gets there 40 minutes after you order it.

This is a common human error: we ask for something or give a direction and we don’t attach a time expectation to it. In our heads, we have one, but we don’t communicate it. Then, when the ask doesn’t manifest in the time we imagined, we get salty.

Don’t have salty pizza. Be clear about the clock, and you’ll deal with far fewer late arrivals.