Big Friendly Vegan

[I wrote this one in 2001.]

I have been a university lecturer for many years now, and while I haven't heard every excuse known to man, his dog (or a combination of both), I have heard a lot of them... several times over - sometimes even from the same person.

The following article is a guide to the most common excuses used by students, as well as a bit of a primer on how to construct better ones. It should be noted that the excuses used in this article are real and have been used on me in the past, and will probably be used in the future. Only the names have been changed to protect the ignorant.

Creative Writing

There is an ancient Chinese fable that goes like this:

A man goes to the wisest monk in the land and asks him the secret to a happy life. The monk thinks about this and says:

"Grandfather dies; father dies; son dies"

The man is shocked at this statement and says to the monk:

"I came here to ask about happiness, but all you talk about is death. Why??"

To which the monk replies:

"This is the natural order of things. Only by following the natural order of things can you have true happiness."
I tell you this story because, over the centuries, this parable has been corrupted. It now goes like this:

A student walks into a bar (which is a hell of a lot more likely to happen than visiting a monk on a mountain top) and asks the bartender the secret of academic happiness. The bartender replies:

"Grandfathers die, grandmothers die, father dies, mother dies, and as many other members of your family die, as required, for the duration of your academic career, because you spend too much time in here, rather than studying. Now, how many beers was that?"
Without doubt, dead grandmothers are the most common excuse that lecturers are presented with at exam time. I think the record in our department is five dead grandmothers in one year (for the same person, that is).

Now, before you start thinking that with stepparents, ex-husbands, adopted parents and so on, five grandmothers may be a possibility - and they all have to die sometime - the timing is eerily suspicious.

If the excuses used at exam time were incorporated into mortality statistics, I am sure they would find that the biggest cause of death amongst women aged 60 and over is having a grandchild in tertiary study. If you plotted the death rates throughout the year for the same group, there would be definite spikes around university exam times. I am sure undertakers pay particular attention to this and order more wood and shovels when it comes to the end of semester. I know this sounds cynical, but every semester, (at exam time) Granny stands a much higher chance of biting the dust.

"Ah!" you say, being the intelligent person that you are, "what about the grandfathers". True! For every grandmother, there is usually a grandfather, but strangely, dead grandfathers rarely come up as excuses at university. For many years I was quite confused about this, until I read that women live, on average, a few years longer than men.

Then it hit me: grandfathers die during high school, grandmothers die during university. QED.

What to say when Granny didn't die.

Not all excuses are about dead grandmothers. Sometimes students seem to suffer from either an over abundance of creativity, or a distinct lack of it. Whatever the cause, they leave their grandparents alone (maybe they have played all the death cards they have) and they usually start attacking technology.

Technology excuses are among my favourites, since I am a technical person and like asking questions (in other words, I enjoy torturing the students). From my point of view, technology excuses have two main themes - cars and computers.
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There is an urban legend about a couple of students who missed an exam (because they were drunk) and claimed it was because they were traveling in the same car, which had a flat tire.

The lecturer agreed to give them a supplementary exam, but each student was put in a different room and could not communicate with the other.

The exam consisted one question: "Which tire?"
While this may just be allegorical, some excuses have come close.

I know, for a fact, that service station managers and the motor clubs of most states will give people written proof that they worked on or attended a call out to fix a particular car. I always make a point of asking for this, along with proof that the car is registered to them, or to someone in the family. I also ask for an affidavit stating that they were indeed driving it at the time in question. This is usually enough to send people running in fright, but occasionally we get the handyman who fixed his own car. When I get one of these characters, I have a simple policy: no grease under the fingernails, no excuse.

The "cyber-dog ate my homework" is the other technology excuse that I quite like. Now, this might work with humanities lecturers, but if you want to use this against a computing lecturer, you had better be well armed.

One semester in particular, I received one of these from a particularly stubborn student. Before this, my policy was simply to tell the student "Bad luck". They were computing students after all and this was a good lesson for them to always keep a backup of their work. This particular student, however, wouldn't budge.

Did he have any written documentation for the assignment? Uhhh... No.

Notes, scribble, jottings, rude drawings, anything? Ummm... No.

Any printouts of his code? Uhhh... No.

Any backups on disk anywhere? Ummm... No.

So the only proof that his assignment was even attempted was on his hard drive at home and he couldn't retrieve it? Yes... Yes!

Solution: bring the whole computer in and I will get the file, even if I have to read it bit by bit.

Result: I never saw the student again.

Excuses' Greatest Secrets - Revealed!

I suppose that it's now time to give you my guide for making up excuses (that is, after all, the only reason I can think of for reading this crap so far).

There really are only two principles to keep in mind:

First of all, apply the K.I.S.S. principle, which states that if you have no real talent, make sure you wear lots of makeup. But seriously folks... real excuses are very simple. They don't involve horrendously long epics of adventure and subsequent disaster. In fact, the longer and more convoluted your story becomes, the more opportunities there are to poke holes in it. Thus, the believability of an excuse is inversely proportional to its complexity.

Secondly, real excuses are usually quite unbelievable:
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For example, a friend of mine asked for (and received) special consideration for his exams after he broke a bone in his right hand during a sword fight (which is exactly what he put on his application form).
This actually happened. I was there. I saw it. Real excuses are like that. The human imagination, while quite capable of creating amazing fantasies like "Alice in Wonderland" or "The Lord of the Rings", is totally unable to match the utter bizarreness of reality.

Last Words

I will leave this rant with what has become my favourite excuse of all. This person must have actually been reading ancient Chinese parables (not just the crib notes), and decided that doing without doing was the way to go. You will notice that it follows my guidelines for a good excuse: it is short and has no loopholes to explore, and it is totally unbelievable. I feel that it deserves proper attention from excuse connoisseurs.

The excuse, verbatim, was:

"I was going to hand the assignment in, but I didn't".

I think that says it all.