Excuses for Being Late to Work

Being late to work is a genre with three sub-genres, and everyone in your office knows which one you belong to. There is transport, which is the respectable one, because a cancelled train is a fact with a website behind it. There is the building itself, which is the funniest one, because nothing says corporate life like standing in your own lobby at nine explaining to a security guard that you do in fact work there. And there is the alarm, which is the honest one, and which everyone has used. The rule for all three is the same: send it before anyone notices, give an arrival time you can actually hit, and then hit it. 'Twenty minutes out' followed by fifty minutes is far more damaging than 'in by ten' followed by ten. Nobody remembers that you were late. Everybody remembers that your estimate was fiction. And once, only once, you get the full-honesty version. 'The alarm went off, I answered it, and then I woke up ninety minutes later' is disarming precisely because nobody makes that up. Below are ten excuses for being late to work, plus twenty in the generator for the mornings the trains conspire.