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Excuses, ExcusesA Likely Story

 

Grim Fairy Tales from Alumni Managers

By Janet Zich

You’ve heard it all before. “The dog ate my homework.” “The cleaning lady threw it out.” “My dog ate rocks.”

Your dog ate what? OK, maybe you haven’t heard every excuse in the book, but most managers have come across a fair number. We asked Stanford Business School alumni to share some of the most memorable they’ve encountered over the years. The excuses they sent us came in all shapes and sizes, but most, like the ones above, blame someone else or cite circumstances beyond the employee’s control.

Kim Firestone, MBA ’62, recalls one employee with an airtight excuse for absence. He called the office, saying simply, “I’m in jail.” Betsy Cotton, MBA ’86, received a more complicated version of the same story. When one of her employees didn’t show up for work because he was behind bars, “We reminded him that the last time he was in jail he had his wife call in on his behalf,” Cotton wrote. “We asked why he hadn’t made the same arrangement again. ‘Because she’s the one who put me there!’ he said.”

Speaking of running afoul of the law, one must admit admiration for the excuse Tom Fitzsimmonds, SEP ’75, received from an employee who missed work and also tested positive for marijuana: “I was stuck in an elevator with a rock band,” said the silver-tongued devil.

Sometimes an excuse tells the boss more than anyone would want to know about an employee’s life. Did Collin Hathaway, MBA ’07, really need to hear that his employee missed two days of work because of “a bad eyebrow waxing.” Yeeew! Or did Luis Barallat-Lopez, MBA ’78, care to get a blow-by-blow description of his employee’s home life? “Sorry to be late, but I was in a fight between my ex-wife and my new mother-in-law.” Sounds rough, but this is an excuse?

And then there was the guy at Dave Hedge’s company who told the boss he couldn’t come to work because he had met someone at a bar who invited him home for a party. “Upon arriving at the party, he found that everyone was nude, drinking, doing drugs, and having sex. He said that he was drugged and woke the next day to find all of the people asleep. He then went home to sleep it off for the rest of the day. This was only one of his tall tales,” said Hedge, MBA ’61, who “finally had to let him go.”

Bummer. But however much of the party guy’s story was true and how much was a product of wishful thinking, he should have known it helps if the tall tale can survive a fact-check. Sam Cataldo, Sloan ’75, recalls one hapless teller of tales who forgot to read the weather report. “They were on their boat, stuck in fog and unable to get to work to finish an assignment. Strangely, no one else in this area experienced any fog,” Cataldo noted.

On the other hand, some people simply cannot tell a lie. John Beeman, MBA ’65, had an employee who might have been better off with a little white one. Instead, he told Beeman he was absent because he was interviewing for a position at another company. Oh, no problem. And Morgan Dudley, MBA ’89, had an assistant who made up an excuse and then apparently thought better of it. “The next day he came into my office, sat down, and told me he had actually just wanted to go to the movies,” Dudley said.

When all else fails, some employees figure a good offense is the best defense. Consider Frances Dias, SEP ’73, who was told in no uncertain terms by an employee that she “was hardly in a position to judge his deadline or work—he was the public information officer.” Dias chalked up the situation to male chauvinism. “His obvious thinking was that I was a woman, hence no abilities,” Dias wrote.

Deirdre Black, MBA ’88, recalls two staff members assigned to research an online auction site and report back. “At the next meeting they said they had nothing to report because they had determined it was a phantom website that didn’t really exist,” Black wrote.

And then there was the fellow who was late for work because he was having his hair cut. Rather than apologize, he blamed it on the company. Since his hair grew on company time, he explained to Mark Babidge, SEP ’83, he figured the company owed him the time to get it trimmed. “Not only that,” Babidge wrote, “he borrowed my vehicle with the excuse that if he didn’t use my car he would waste too much time walking to the barber.”

Some quasi-excuses attempt to divert the listener from the matter at hand, like this classic, courtesy of Jack Grocki, MBA ’65. Grocki was one of some 150 people who became increasingly annoyed as they waited for an employee who was scheduled to give an early morning presentation. When the speaker finally took the stage, he excused himself by saying, “Sorry, but I would have been even later if I hadn’t been awakened by seven naked Swedes cavorting in my neighbor’s hot tub.” Grocki and his colleagues’ attention instantly turned from the employee to the seven suburban skinny-dippers, who, if you must know, were part of a hockey team touring the United States and staying with the speaker’s next-door neighbor. “They apparently thought it was perfectly normal to carry on naked in a hot tub at 7 a.m.,” Grocki wrote.

If lies get found out and diversions don’t do the trick, humor—if used judiciously—can be effective. Rick Abell, Sloan ’78, told this tale on himself: “In the U.S. Air Force, each officer must receive an annual evaluation, and one of my staff was late in providing the report. This caused us both to report to the commanding general. After a thorough verbal lashing, the general asked what did we have to say. Immediately Skip replied, ‘The dog ate my homework.’ We were dismissed amid much laughter.”

Finally comes the trickiest of all: the no-excuse. Executed by the right person, it works. We owe this example to Rick Derrington, MBA ’76, who wrote, “I went to Acapulco for a meeting with the president of Mexico. He never showed up! I waited five days … .” All we can say is, don’t try this one at home, kids—unless you’re a head of state.