Lateness is often defended by appeals to traffic, unreliable transport, and unforeseen interruptions. These explanations are not always false; urban life is genuinely unpredictable. Yet they have also become a convenient language through which avoidable delays are presented as unavoidable circumstances.
People usually defend lateness with a few recurring arguments — worth laying out fairly since there’s real substance on both sides. These days’ time estimates are inherently uncertain where congested traffic, transit delays, and unexpected interruptions and many things in life aren’t fully within anyone’s control.
There are common and convenient excuse that plenty of people use to arrest other people helpless mind reasoning to submit for latness. However, it is now common to hear people lie in public transport making lie describing the place they have reached when the place they really are is far or different from what they are telling to someone they want to reach or to wait them.
It is hard to verify in the moment. The other person can’t check your GPS, so such lies are easy to make, and they are good to appear convincing helping you victimless though untrue. This is a secondary layer of deception built around lateness. Such lies borrows credibility from the impossibility of verification. These kind of lies survives not because they are convincing, but because it’s unfalsifiable in the moment.
Currently, trust in these small daily interactions has quietly shifted from verification-based to faith-based precisely because technology like GPS, transit apps makes verification possible but social norms haven’t caught up to demanding it to this level.
Such tools help to catch where the lie exist, but using them would itself feel like an accusation, so people let the lie stand either for social reason or for lack of the system. Yet, small deceptions compound the same way chronic lateness does, but they’re harder to call out or openly point out or confront someone about something they did wrongly because each individual instance seems too small and too uncertain to justify confrontation.
Many times you let it pass easy because it is hard to actually say to the person, “You lied about where you were” because any single instance of this sort connected to being 10 minutes or more further away than claimed feels too minor or petty to make an issue of.
In public transport and other shared spaces, it has become increasingly common to overhear people describing, in great detail, places they have not reached and have no real intention of reaching, all to deceive and reassure the caller on the other end of the line the different story they have created. These fabricated accounts, delivered with surprising confidence, turn everyone nearby into an forced audience.
The caller on the other end of the line may have no way to check the story, but the people sitting beside the speaker do. They can see the bus is still crawling through traffic while the caller is being told it is almost at the gate. A lie that survives because it is unverifiable to one listener is, in the same moment, fully exposed to everyone else within earshot.
A more troubling habit has developed alongside chronic lateness: the false account of one’s location. A person still several stops away may confidently say, “I am almost there,” knowing that the waiting person cannot immediately verify the claim. The lie endures not because it is persuasive, but because it is temporarily unfalsifiable. Asking for proof may appear distrustful or accusatory, so many people accept the statement on faith.
The result is a quiet shift from verification-based trust to faith-based trust. Each small falsehood may seem insignificant, but repeated deception weakens the credibility on which everyday cooperation depends. A society does not lose trust only through major betrayals; it also loses it through a thousand convenient “I am almost there” stories.
Ethiopian public transport has produced many unsung performers. They do not hold microphones, sell tickets, or ask for applause. They simply answer a phone call and announce, with the confidence of a national news anchor, “I am just around the corner.”
The audience did not buy tickets. They were simply sitting nearby, minding their own business, when a private lie became public theatre. The speaker describes imaginary streets, invented landmarks, and a heroic final approach to the destination. The passengers listen, smile, and remember the Amharic wisdom: wedew aysequ—laughter comes uninvited.
All the same, the uncertainty is only the honest half of lateness. The other half begins when the delay is real and the speaker decides to hide it. Yet the lies become a kind of impromptu of a sudden stand-up comedy turning white lies into theatre material for bystanders to be amused.
This familiar scene brought to mind Eyayu Fungus, the celebrated Ethiopian stand-up comedy that turns ordinary, amusing moments of daily life into theatrical material. This well-known Amharic proverb, “wedew aysequ”— —“ወደው አ ይስቁ”— literally, mean “laughter comes uninvited.” This is lagely because none of the people around signed up for this performance, yet everyone laughs anyway.
The same instinct sits behind “Eyayu Fungus,” that built its humour on exactly this kind of everyday fiction, where the confidence on a white lie is the joke. The Ethiopian proverb: —“ወደው አ ይስቁ”— captures it easily because laughter is not sometimes something we grant on request. It escapes us when the gap between what is said and what is true becomes too obvious to ignore, and the overheard speaker, sure that no one is listening, supplies that gap leaving the substance as a free amusement piece.
Now white lie is serving critical purpose. It is rarely idle. The fiction has a job to do, and that is what makes it so confidently delivered: the speaker is not performing for us, only fleeing a discomfort. We simply happen to witness the escape and the unintended stand-up comedy.
For the speaker, the white lie is a means of escape. Someone running late claims to be “I am almost there,” while may be still two stops away. Yet the invented journey buys time, avoids an argument, and keeps the caller calm.
Nonetheless, a lie told to get out of one situation walks straight into different stage. Spoken aloud in a crowded space, it stops being private and becomes theatre material specifically a unscripted stand-up comedy for bystanders. What the speaker uses as a way out, is received by the audience around as spontaneous comedy. Simply put, the lie takes a sudden dual life and escape the author to be an unscripted comedy.
In public transport and other shared spaces, these private fictions often become public performances. A passenger, speaking loudly into a phone, constructs an elaborate account of places they have not reached and may be never intended to reach elaborate account of a journey that exists only in imagination, and the nearby strangers become an uninvited, unpaid audience.
Lateness itself is forgivable; the roads, the queues, the traffic and the day’s small disruptions guarantee it. What is harder to excuse is the quiet fiction built on top of it, the “I’m almost there” that buys a few minutes of calm at the cost of a little truth.
We rarely challenge it, because verification feels like accusation and any single lie seems too small to matter. So the lie stands, earning its way through public space as the substance of accidental theatre for everyone who overhears, and as protection of temper on the other end, sparing the teller an unwanted challenge. Perhaps that is why we laugh. The laughter is not only at the speaker but at ourselves, at a world where we have all agreed to believe what we cannot check, and where a lie, delivered with enough confidence, is the only thing that arrives on time, uncalled.
Small deceptions compounded with lateness in this way mostly go unchallenged. Although technology has made verification possible, unwritten social norms have not made it acceptable, so we continue to rely on faith rather than steadfast proof.
