Admiral H. G. Rickover, known in America as 'the father of the nuclear submarine', put this notice on his office door to short-circuit involved excuses from his staff:

To save time for me and yourself, give your excuse by numbers:

1 I thought I told you.

2 That's the way we've always done it.

3 No one told me to go ahead.

4 I didn't think it was that important.

5 I'm so busy I just couldn't get around to it.

6 Why bother? The Admiral won't buy it.

7 I didn't know you were in a hurry for it.

8 That's his job, not mine.

9 I forgot.

10 I'm waiting for the OK.

11 That's not my department.

12 How did I know this was different?

13 Wait until the boss comes back and ask him.

Bosses tend to take the same cynical view of excuses advanced by employees who turn up late for work. I must have witnessed several thousands of these, delivered with practised sincerity, but I doubt if more than a handful have been believed. The rule seems to be, the more unlikely the explanation, the more likely it is to be accepted as the truth.

Some years ago a colleague arrived very late for work drenched to the skin. As it was a bright sunny day, clearly two explanations were owed. He told a heart-rending tale of being stuck in an automatic car wash. His car would neither go forward nor back, and the girl operating the machine didn't know how to switch it off. Finally - so he said, anyway - he had to abandon his car and make a dash for safety through the squirting jets and whirling brushes in an attempt to switch it off himself.

My colleague's heroic escape - as his bad timekeeping had now become - was reported in the following day's newspaper, prompting a reader to write in revealing how he was late for work when his budgie slipped off his bald head into his porridge. It took him ages, he said, to clean the porridge off the bird.

Lloyds Bank house magazine told the story of the cashier who kept on turning up late for work with the explanation: 'I forgot I had been transferred and went to my old branch.'

A friend swears that he overheard the following conversation and that the excuse was believed by the Powers That Be in his office:

EMPLOYEE: I'm sorry I'm late. Our Alsatian dog mounted my wife while she was drying her hair in front of the fire and pushed her head-first into the grate. I've been at the vet's.

BOSS: The vet? Why the vet?

EMPLOYEE: My wife hit the dog with a poker and we had to have it put down.

Back to Art of Excuses Index