Seven Rules for Coming Up with a Good Excuse
by What you definitely do not want to do after committing a faux pas, is to compound the problem with a bad excuse. Follow these seven simple rules to make your goofs a little more tolerable.
Excuses are as old as recorded history. When Adam ate the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, he gave a tired excuse…and this was the first time it had every been used. He told God, “the woman you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” Of course, he didn’t have a father himself, someone he could model himself after and learn how to make a really good excuse. So he blamed God and his wife for all his problems, and life continues unchanged to this day.
A poll by CareerBuilder.com found that one-third of all employees in the past year have called in “sick.” Rather than tell the truth, we make up a story to make skipping work socially acceptable. While 27% of those calling in actually did have a Doctor’s appointment, more often the person just didn’t feel like going in to work (34%) or wanted to stay home and relax ( 30%). Interestingly enough, the Career Builder.com survey also found that one-in-ten employees are also late for work at least twice a week, every week, and 20% are late at least once a week. Traffic is the most common patsy that the tardy point to (33%), but a lot of people blame a lack of sleep (24%), or even their poor kids (10%).
However excuses serve a useful purpose. “Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature should study people’s excuses,” (Hebbel). Psychologists point out that excuses allow us to retain a “sense of self.” Excuses allow us to defend our actions, however deluded the excuses may be. Some researchers postulate that there may actually be three reasons we made up excuses:
- Retention of a positive self-image
- Reducing anger
- Changing the expectations of the one being given the excuse
Yes, I’ll go along with all those. Although I haven’t been consciously thinking of these reasons when I have made up excuses. I know that when it comes to giving excuses to my wife, reason #2 is actually a big #1 with me, and it’s not even close.
There is an old Yiddish saying, “If you don’t want to do something, one excuse is just as good as another.” We use an excuse for a reason, we want to get off the hook. In order to do that we don’t want just any old excuse, we want a good one. To come up with a good one we need to follow a few basic rules.
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