Carpooling coworker stress rant

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Hi all, this is a rant.

I work at a small minerals processing plant in the middle of nowhere. There are a few small towns around the place, varying in size from population 10 to population 20,000. My town is the biggest town but it's about 1 hour away. There's only one other non-manager who works with me and lives just outside my town on the way to work, so we carpool. Of course, the managers have different hours than non-managers and workers, so they don't count.

I have to be at work at 7am and to 9 hours, and I am absolutely not a morning person. On weekends I sleep in until 10pm and later, I really really struggle with mornings. My cw hates mornings too, but when he drives himself he easily gets to work at 7. When I drive myself, I usually get in at 7:10-7:15, but I make up for it by working an extra 10-15 minutes. My cw is married with no pets and eats breakfast at work, so all he has to do is get out of bed, dress, wait for me to show up in my car. I live alone so i have to open all my curtains and some windows (to air my house out while I'm out, where I live is cold and wet for 80% of the year), I eat breakfast (I am a lab worker and flat out for the first 4 hours of every day), feed my cat, lock up my house, and drive 10 mins to cw's house. I almost always make us 10-15 minutes late, but whenver I get to my cw's house early, even 2 minutes early, he makes a big deal about it, saying 'oooooh why are you so early today??' He expects me to show up at 6:30 am according to his car clock, no later or earlier! Today I showed up at 6:24 and he went on an on. Sometimes I'm a bit later than 6:30 because the highway I go on always has heaps of trucks and tankers which can hold you up.

Then when we show up at work (or if on a day where I drive myself and I show up later than cw) one of the superintendents who's office is next to mine always comments and it's frustrating. he says things like 'oh, you're awake this morning?' Never mind that the actual manager that runs the plant is always, ALWAYS at least 1.5 hours late. Most of the other superintendents are late too, or really early. My plant is quite a relaxed workplace and no one else except for my cw and the super seems to care as long as they do 9 hours. My manager even told me to my face that he doesn't really care, as long as i do the time. I can even work from home if I need to.

When it gets to home time, 4pm, cw has to leave at 4 on the dot, no later. When we first started carpooling 2 years ago (yes, it's been that long!) I asked him if worries him that I am so late every morning, and he said no, that we can just do some time over 4pm. But I think that he is starting to get really annoyed about it. For the last 6 months or so, he packs up and makes sure he is ready to go out the door at 4pm (his office is just down from mine and I can hear him packing up). If I take longer than a couple of minutes, he comes into my office, sits at the tech's computer next to mine, and is just extremely annoying until I pack up. I have a lot of lab stuff sitting on my desk and he gets it all and plays with it, moves it around, and asks me what it is, etc. If I say 'can you leave my stuff alone, I'll be ready in 1 minute,' he laughs at me and says I'm getting angry at him. I really hate it.

If it comes to 4pm and I'm still in the lab, he will come down to the lab and ask what I'm doing, tell me to hurry up, and again, hang around and touch/move stuff. Once I was in the weighing room where you have to be careful with movement due to the precision balances. He came in and I told him to leave because he was upsetting the balances, he laughed at me as if I was an idiot and waited in my office for me to come in. Usually I just have 1 tiny job to finish off and I don't like leaving things half done.

On days where the big manager is still there at 4pm which is rare, he doesn't do this, he just packs up and waits in his office because the big manager's office is between ours.

He laughs at me and goes on and on about other things too, not just the work times. Today he told me I was 'soft' because i put my jumper on for the drive back. That is ok, I can handle that, and I laughed and said 'nah I'm colder than you' but he kept going for about 10 minutes, about how it wasn't even cold. I bit back, then he did the laugh at me because I'm angry thing. I wasn't angry!

There is probably a cultural barrier thing here maybe, and definitely a bit of a language barrier. He is Japanese, I am Australian, but he's my best friend at work when he's not doing these things and I don't want to upset him. I think that I'm most likely depressed and somethings really just get to me, but he never used to be like this! I am just so stressed and I don't know what to do. Surely something like this shouldn't be that stressful. I used to carpool with 2 other coworkers who have since retired who actually used to just hurl abuse at me.

Rant over!

This person does not seem like a friend.