Apologies, and so forth...

I have a pretty steady rule about apologies, and it's basically this: Apologize and then shut up while you're ahead.

By that, I mean don't offer excuses, especially if they're good ones. If nothing else, you are likely to simply surprise the person you are apologizing to, as they are likely used to hearing every manner of extenuating circumstance Scotch-taped to the tail end of "I'm sorry."

I mean, have you ever listened to the way some people apologize? There almost always seems to be an excuse thrown in for good measure; some perfectly good reason for things having turned out the way they did.

But the cold, hard reality is this: even if circumstances are fully extenuating, the end result—for the person you're ostensibly apologizing to because something happened, or didn't—doesn't change the outcome that made the apology necessary to begin with.

Furthermore, excuses give the person being apologized to a "hook" with which to drag you all over the landscape, if said person so chooses. (Did you ever have a teacher drag out the "You should have taken that into consideration" argument in response to an excuse along the lines of "I'm late because... the school bus drove off a cliff"? That's the "hook" distilled to white heat.)

Part of my attitude may be a remnant of Marine boot camp, where the prevailing philosophy could be distilled to a single observation: "Excuses are like bellybuttons. Everybody's got one." (In truth, I seem to recall the mention of another part of the body, but I digress...) The message, however, was pretty clear: nobody's interested, get on with your life.

Another part of my education about excuses occurred while working at my first publishing job, sending scientific journals to the printer each week. One week, I must have left my brain at home on the day stuff was submitted, because this one journal was sent to press with the wrong date on the cover. This became known only after the issue had been printed and bound, and to say that my boss was upset underscores the inadequacy of the printed word as a medium of communication. He was furious, and I was told (by older and wiser editors) to expect a rather lengthy session on the carpet.

When I was summoned to my boss's office, I decided to put what I had read in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to work. Before my boss could say anything, I said, "John, I've seen the cover and I'm pretty upset about it, too. It was my responsibility to make sure it was done right, and I screwed up. It was entirely my fault. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

Carnegie describes this technique, if memory serves, as "taking the wind out of their sails." (I mean, what was my boss going to do, disagree with me?) My boss gave me a hard look, threw the copy of the journal that he was holding in the trash, and said something along the lines of "Right. Make sure that it doesn't." And he dismissed me.

Total time spent in his office was probably under a minute. When discreet inquiries on the part of my peers (made to our boss's secretary) revealed that I hadn't been simply fired outright, they would arrange to stop by to find out what happened. I told them. They were surprised.

One of the whines one often hears about Carnegie is how his advice is so manipulative, etc. And yes, my choice of words was designed to make my life easier by reducing the severity of the dressing down I was in for, but nothing I said was untrue: It had been my responsibility and I had not been diligent in my job. I was sorry, and I was going to do my level best to keep what happened from happening again.

That said, as I advance in age, I find I have begun to take the occasional opportunity to soft-pedal an excuse if I think some good might eventually come of it. For example, I completed a short job that was due today, but then could not find the email to which I needed to respond. When I finally found what I needed—30 minutes after deadline—I felt compelled to violate my own rule about "no excuses" and sent off the following note with the translated file:

Apologies for the 30 minute delay in delivery. I spun wheels looking for an email from Belinda, not realizing my mail program had identified the sender as Jillian, and that the reply email actually belonged to Samuel. In the end, it got sorted out, but only after some head-scratching (and an update to my address book).

There's a part of me that, even now, regrets having tacked on that explanation, I suspect because I generally avoid doing so.

However, what's done is done, and in the broader scheme of things, it's not worth losing sleep over.

Cheers...