Why I was late"On the way to the station, I got hit by a bat, it almost took my head clean off. Then the machine would not accept my ticket and the guy at the gate didn't think I looked like the photo on my travel card. So I had to go home and get my passport.
Then the train was 45 minutes late to the station because of the dangerous badger threat at Carpenters Park.
When I was on the train it took and hour and a half to get past the biscuit factory because the driver was really fat.
Then there was a delay stopping at the station because the train in front had heard we were coming and decided to play a practical joke with a rubber shoe on the track.
That is why I couldn't get here on time today."
What's your best excuse?
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chthonic, Thu 28 Jun 2007, 10:36)
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Bloody fucking cold, that's why!I went to forestry school in the mid 80s at a tiny college in the northern Adirondack Mountains, and was living in Saranac Lake NY at the time. (Google for it to see where I'm talking about.) One of the things I had to get used to there was the extreme cold- on a normal night during the winter it would get to be about -20 to -30 F, and it was not uncommon for it to hit -40 F.
At the time I drove a 1977 Toyota Corolla, colored about like Guilden's Spicy Brown Mustard- kinda babyshit yellow, and incredibly ugly, but it ran. Kinda. (Actually, it was a maze of rigged improvisations by the time I got rid of it, to the point where I suspect that the engineers who designed it would have shot me in cold blood. But that's another story.)
So one morning I had an 8:00 class and had to drive to campus. I get to the car at 7:30, well before the sun had a chance to touch it, and managed to get it started- but then I saw that it was just about out of gas, and wouldn't make it on what I had. So I cursed and went to the gas station, where I went to open the gas cap- and found that it was frozen shut.
This being the mid-80s, we had had the so-called Energy Crisis only a few years before, so the previous owner had put a locking gas cap on it to prevent siphoning. And now, when it was -40 F, the damn lock was solid. And, of course, it had to be on a morning when I had class with a teacher who would take points off if you showed up even one minute late to her class.
I went into the gas station and got them to give me a pitcher of hot water, which I then poured over the gas cap until I could insert the key and turn it. Once the tank was open I filled it- but now that hot water had turned to ice which made it impossible to put the cap back on the tank.
I walked into the class ten minutes late, incurring an incensed glare from the teacher. Wordlessly I walked to the front of the classroom and put the gas cap on her desk, key still frozen in place, and took my seat.
It took her a minute to figure it out, but then she at least had the decency to laugh.
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The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 28 Jun 2007, 16:43,
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