Meetings at my company generally start five minutes late. If you show up at the scheduled time, you’ll just be sitting around for five minutes shuffling your papers until everybody else meanders in a twelfth of an hour later.

That tardiness really irked me when I started. It still does, but since I’m leaving in a week, apathy has set in heavy, so whatever.

Unfortunately, things were a bit worse today. I hurried back from lunch to get to a one-on-one transition meeting, in which I was to impart my hard-fought knowledge on my replacement. I showed up to the conference room at the scheduled start time to prepare a bit before the expected arrival of the other half of the meeting, five minutes hence.

Well, those 300 seconds came and went, and the meeting still consisted of me, a whiteboard, and an empty chair where my coworker should have been. The dilemma: is it correct to leave, or is it better to stay?

I stalled for a while by drawing on the whiteboard, checking the missing person’s cube, drawing some more, checking my mail, checking my e-mail, checking my mail again, and finally just sitting in the conference room reading EE Times. It’s not that I didn’t have anything else to do, but I didn’t want to abandon hope that the other person might soon show up. In hindsight, I suppose I could have left a note for the person to come find me in my cube, but that didn’t occur to me at the time.

And so I kept waiting.

Finally, my one meeting invitee rolled in, 55 minutes late. Wow. I mean, that takes skill.

I’m not sure what’s worse: the fact that she was nearly an hour late to a 90-minute meeting, or the fact that I waited.

It turned out that she had lost track of time while at lunch, so her egregious tardiness wasn’t intentional. She was extremely apologetic, and we ended up having a good discussion, one that will continue next week. In other words, it all turned out OK.

Still, 55 minutes?