Best Excuses
A lively thread in the post about the sacking of Paul Buchanan who told a student he did not believe her father had died (and we are yet to have confirmed if said father is indeed dead) as an excuse for a late essay.
So what are the best excuses you have made or had made to you for a late assisgnment or essay. My best excuse was in 1996 for one of quant papers. It went like this:
I won’t be able to get my essay to you today but I have a really good excuse.
It all started a couple of weeks ago when the Prime Minister did really badly in the first leader’s debate. We decided we needed to have our supporters more fired up, so I got assigned to training up around 30 – 40 of them in how to heckle.
The lecturer looks at me and realises this is a fairly original and possibly lengthy explanation.
So anyway I put together a sheet on good heckle lines, and how to time your heckle etc. Had some very good lines such as reminding Jim Anderton who campaigned against cheap Japanese imports that his campaign bus was a cheap Japanese import nickname Sooty due to the masses of exhaust it exhaled. Also lines to Winston Peters such as “Michael Laws told you to say that” no matter what the topic is.
Anyway we had the meeting and it went very well. That was two days ago. Then yesterday it transpired that some prick had photocopied the heckle lines and went and stuck a copy of them underneath every door in the press gallery.
Hence yesterday at around 9.30 am my phone started to go crazy. It was the day of the second and final Leader’s debate and all the press had a copy of my heckling memo and lines for supporters. I got hauled into McCully’s office and told that I was to flee the premises, avoiding any press, and not turn up for a few days until it had died down.
So I immediately went from McCully’s office down in the private Ministerial lift the press can’t get to, and out through the basement, avoiding the horde of journalists in the corridor looking for me.
Now the problem sir is that my text books and my notes were in my Beehive office. I couldn’t get past the media to retrieve them so I had to leave them there. But I should be able to go in at the weekend and get them, so could I hand my assignment in on next Monday.
The lecturer then responded with words along the lines of:
I’m going to give you the extension for two reasons.
- Even if you are lying, you deserve an extension for the originality of the excuse. I doubt I will hear such a convoluted story again.
- You were the lead item on the TV3 news last night
🙂