Seven Rules for Coming Up with a Good Excuse

7 Rules for Excuse Making

1. Be specific. It just makes you look desperate when you are blaming everyone. Aldous Huxley once said, “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.” Back to our example of the poor sap, Adam. There were only four people mentioned to be in existence, including himself, and he blamed everyone but himself. “You gave her to me,” so it’s your fault, not mine. Oh, brother. Rule number one, if your going to make someone mad by blaming them for your own shortcomings, don’t blame the Almighty. Ouch.
2. Don’t make an excuse that actually makes you look worse than if you had just told the truth. Shakespeare nailed it when he wrote,

   “And oftentimes excusing of a fault
   Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.”

   It makes me wonder if he “borrowed” that line from an old French proverb, “Justifying a fault doubles it.”

   The following is an actual excuse written by a parent of a school child who had missed school.

   “Please excuse Jennifer for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the Sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it Monday, we thought it was Sunday.”

   I’m not a principal, but if I had seen this excuse I would be calling my Congressman about passing a law requiring some kind of minimal I.Q. score before being able to pop out children.

3. The excuse must be time sensitive. Your excuse must have kept you from your social obligation at that specific point in time. We all know that traffic is worse in the morning when everyone is also trying to get to work. So using that excuse, though hackneyed, might just fly. But if you tell your boss that you stayed home to watch a rerun of I Love Lucy, he might just give you plenty of time to stay home and watch something on TV that is showing constantly.
4. Use an excuse that is not too convenient for you. Telling the father of your date that you ran out of gas at a spot that lends itself to making out, just won’t fly with the father. We should all carry around the following quotation for the next time someone tries to give us an excuse, “We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty,” (Marcus Fabius Quintilian).
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   Here is an excuse that will work. It is an actual excuse given to the school by a parent, “Please excuse Ray Friday from school. He has very loose vowels.” That English teacher is just not doing a lousy job, she can’t get her students to tighten their vowels for nothing.

5. Be careful to select the right person to tell your excuse. If that person has made great sacrifice to do more than you have, you are toast. Here’s a good exercise. Go down to the rifle range at the local VFW and tell whatever disabled veteran you find there that you couldn’t vote because it was too much trouble to get off the couch.
6. The excuse should fit the crime. Telling your wife the reason you didn’t take out the trash was that it slipped your mind, might get you off with a light sentence. But if you tell her you forgot her birthday, it’s the death penalty for you my friend. If you have done something bad, you will need a really good excuse. In a list of actual excuses given by employees for being late for work, one woman told her e boss that her ex-husband stole her car. Now that’s what I’m talking about. However, on that same list another employee stated that the reason he was late was that the line at Starbucks was too long. I wonder if the line is too long at the unemployment office.
7. Don’t use the same excuse every time. If your alarm clock doesn’t work every day, your co-workers will wonder why you haven’t got a new alarm clock or at least a new excuse. Think ahead. You know your going to do it, so start thinking of that excuse now while you have time. “Every vice has its excuse ready,” (Publilius Syrus).

If you must use an excuse, these are the rules for making up a good excuse. Of course we could do as our parents liked to tell us, “Don’t do something you will need an excuse for.” And, yes it is true, “No one excused his way to success,” (Dave Del Dotto). There is an old Yiddish proverb, “If you don’t want to do something, one excuse is just as good as another.