Nah, it’s usually said by people who think they controlled every aspect of their lives or neglected to recognize what help they were given so think if someone needs help that person takes no personal responsibility for their own life.
In other words, “I never needed help (lucky that catastrophe never befell them, or doesn’t recognize what help they’ve been given), so if you need a safety net you screwed up.”
“It’s not their fault, that’s just how they were raised.”
I don’t care. As a grown up, you’re responsible for any ugliness you perpetuate, I don’t care how you were raised and when.
A guy I once worked with had bought a horse, & was going to build a fence around his yard. I stopped to see what progress he’d made, & the posts just wagged around loosely. I said, “You didn’t tamp the dirt around your posts?”. He said, “My dirt’s different. I have a magnetic disturbance under my property, & dirt doesn’t settle”.
Right.
The classic, go-to lame excuse for just about anything in my family, said in the whiniest voice you can muster up: “But I didn’t knoooowwwww…”
It’s great to use for any occasion!
“I haven’t had time to” = "I haven’t cared enough to ". Synonymous with “I’ve been too busy to”
“Oh I can’t eat there/that, I’m allergic to X” = I don’t like the way X tastes. I remember my mom pulled this on a restaurant that failed to mention mushrooms were in a particular dish on the menu (and the name was not descriptive either). My sister hated mushrooms, but no Mom, you didn’t need to lie and tell the waitress that she was ALLERGIC to them.
I have absolutely got to use that at my very earliest opportunity! That’s a keeper!
Actually, I think that a kludge that works well enough is far superior to something that’s pretty but is basically non-functional. I’d say that the old boss had his priorities straight.
Or, as my brother puts it: “that’s prehistorical”.
I like Obelix’ self-description as being “low-chested”.
Even more annoying is when they use this during an argument to invalidate evidence. “I wasn’t alive at that time, so it didn’t happen. Because of this (and my willful ignorance), I win the argument!”
A similar tactic: idiots who try to invalidate evidence by declaring, “I was out of the country/in grad school/working out west at the time”. (I realize this can be reasonable if the person is *conceding *the argument and giving a reason why they were not aware of the evidence: “Hmm, I didn’t know that.”)
There’s an annoying idiot who frequents a bar where I play music. He’s in his mid-30’s, lives with his parents, and works about 6-8 months out of the year (he games the unemployment insurance system by going through the motions of applying for jobs, only actually looking for a job when his unemployment runs out.)
One day he was whining about his inability to find work. I mentioned that a gas station (within walking distance of his home) had help-wanted signs up. He said he could never work there, *because that brand of gas made his car run rough.
*
‘I didn’t get that email.’ The same people seem to miss inconvenient emails a lot, maybe there’s something wrong with their area of the internet.
‘My wife forgot to give me the message.’ Maybe she did. Or maybe you chose to ignored the message and now you’re going to make your spouse take the blame. Double-douche.
Related: “Sorry I took so long to reply to your e-mail, but I don’t check that account very often. Next, time, e-mail me at…” ARRRRGGGGH!
But something that’s pretty and functional is superior to both. If you take the time to do it right, you make the process simpler for yourself, it’s easier to teach to someone later and down the line you don’t have an annoying game of Pickup Sticks as you try to add or modify a kludge without wrecking everything else.
And my official BS excuse is, “The file got corrupted.”
Ever see a fat skeleton?
“why should I have to change?” Said by people who think the whole universe is going to bend to their wind whims.
Change is hard. It’s humbling to own up to our faults. People can be so quick to screech that people are victim blaming and not see things they are doing that are genuinely making things worse.
I’ll throw in one that I use on my customers:
“The internet must have eaten the email, I don’t see it anywhere. Well, I guess you’ll have to send it again.”
What actually happened is I somehow missed the email from two days ago. I’ve already found it and am staring at it right now, but there’s no way I’m going to admit to that. It’s not that I don’t feel bad, it’s just if I ever do admit to actually doing something wrong, someone in the chain says “NEVER EVER admit to a customer that you did anything wrong”
He may have been lazy with the posts, but he wasn’t lazy with the excuse. Either he put a bit of thought into it or he’s just had that much experience giving excuses.
“Weird, it went into my Spam folder. Just found it now.”
“I’ll pray on it” means “…there ya go. I’ve just fulfilled any responsibility I might have had in this situation because I have turned it over to God.”
Pretty AND functional is optimal, yes. But if it’s one or the other, I’m gonna go with functional every time. Plus there’s the fact that people’s tastes differ. My mother, for instance, thought that Comet Cursor was just the prettiest set of cursors available.