Dear Melody’s boss:
Please excuse Melody for being late to work today as her car was surrounded by a gaggle of geese and she was held hostage at beakpoint until such time as they saw fit to let her go.
Thank you.
Signed,
Melody’s Mother
Your Turn!
Years ago I was running about 0.000001 seconds late. I left my apartment and started walking down the street. I farted. Except, uh, it wasn’t quite a fart. Not 100% air, that is.
I figured I could keep going an show up on time. I opted, instead, not to spend the day sitting in my own shit. I went back home and changed.
My boss asked why I was late. I chose “overslept” as my excuse.
You could have just ditched the undies and ran free all day. 
Yeah, but I figured that doing the Free Willy thing on the street might not have pleased my neighbors.
Coincidentally, I was late to work today because my wife kept me in bed to get jiggy for a while.
OK, not that bizarre, but it seemed like a good place to share.
I’m picturing this excuse being pinned up on the office bulletin board. Did you get a lot of quiet, but wide-eyed people walking furtively past your cubicle for the next few days?
no - more like several guys making duck noises when they came to get m&m’s . . . .
I actually had the same thing happen, but luckily didn’t have to be anywhere on time. Some geese kept hissing and chasing my front bumper. At first I didn’t think it was a problem. I just backed out of the parking space, but the little freaks kept running at my bumper, so I couldn’t see them and if I moved forward, I’d squish 'em.
I kept reversing and they kept chasing, until I ran out of real estate and got stuck at the back end of the parking lot. I’d get out, chase 'em away, and by the time I got my seatbelt done back up they were attacking my bumper again.
Finally a delivery guy helped me out. He stood and waved his arms so they started chasing him, with murder in their eyes, and I was able to drive off. I wonder if the poor dude got pecked to death?
Posted before:
Actual excuse heard from a former co-worker: “I can’t come in, my boyfriend is having a bad trip.”
That made me laugh out loud. Thanks for sharing!
Around here, there is actually a service called Goose Busters - they will actually chase off the geese from the property. The property management at my last job used them several times a season. But since this was at my house, I was kind of stuck until they deemed to let me by.
Dear Boss:
Anaamika is going to be late to work today because they were loading a helicopter onto a flatbed on the main road she works on, and they had traffic stopped in both directions. The helicopter apparently was being ornery.
Thanks!
Signed,
Anaamika’s other half.
Dear Jjimm’s old boss,
Jjimm was late back from lunch because he was stuck in an elevator with eleven Filipino architects. They worked on the 18th floor and he was on the way to their office with them, but the elevator just kept on going right to the top and got jammed at the pulley.
Jjimm and the architects amused themselves during the next hour by doing farmyard impressions, until they were rescued by the fire brigade, who levered the bottom of the door open with their axes and helped them all down.
That this incident made Jjimm only twenty minutes late back from lunch is no reason to invalidate the story. And this was before cellphones so there was no way he could have let you know. You sour-faced beeyatch.
Similarly Bird-related: I hit a peacock that took wing in front of my car 2 or 3 years ago. The bird was fine, it just glanced off my antenna and scrabbled its claws across the roof, then disappeared into the woods nearby. I had to call my boss and explain that I was late because I’d hit a flying peacock. She and I both hadn’t even known they could fly.
Worse is that my son, who was a little under 3 at the time and in the car when it happened, regaled everyone for days with the story of when “The 'cock got Mommy”
The worst true excuse I’ve had to use was that I was pulled over by the police on the way to work and the roadside sobriety check took longer than I thought. I guess I was weaving a bit but I was not drunk. I had been awake for nearly sixty hours at that time. I probably had no business going in to work in that state but I was out of vacation time.
I’ve shared this one before.
Not me, but a friend who worked at the same place:
“I’ll be late. There’s a dead guy in my car and the cops won’t let me leave.”
The guy had sneaked into their garage. It was winter, and he was cold, so he started the car. He might have been high, or drunk. This is small town Iowa, where it’s not unusual to leave the garage unlocked and keys in the car.
I had to call in late coming back from a lunch break once because I’d run over my next-door neighbor’s cat.
The part they may have found even harder to believe was later, when asked for a followup, I told them all (truthfully!) that the cat turned out to be fine!
“As God is my witness, I thought -”
Dear Boss:
Ferret will be late to work because the train tracks flooded, and she has to go a couple towns north to catch a train on a different line.
- Ferret’s Husband
The worst thing was, that other line didn’t run very often and I’d just missed the end of their rush hour burst of trains, so I ended up being about 3 hours late to work.
It was novel the first couple of times I took off work using, “Boss, I won’t be in today because we had a fire (or other disaster) last night…”. I’m a volunteer fireman/EMT.
He now remembers that, and doesn’t start an office collection for me.
Slight tangent: I really did miss an assignment in high school because the dog destroyed it. When I showed the teacher the papers with muddy paw prints, he gave me another day to re-copy it.