Llego en quince, “I’ll be there in fifteen.” Ya voy para allá, “I’m on my way.” Voy de salida, “I’m just leaving.” In 2015, Rulo Luna Ramos explained what these phrases really mean, for Matador Network in Spanish. The first, he wrote, means half an hour, forty minutes at most. The second means “I’m going to go.” The third means “I’m turning on the water heater.”
Among friends, people say of someone who is late, as the columnist Joel Hernández Santiago noted in Quadratín in 2017: “a este, para comer con él, invítenlo a desayunar” (to have lunch with this one, invite him to breakfast).