Making Excuses

 

Whoever said we don’t make anything in this country anymore obviously never visited the Excuse Factory somewhere between Elkhart Indian and Bangor, Maine. But you can’t really blame them, can you? We’re opening up facilities up and down the eastern seaboard, with plans to expand to the Midwest by early next year. Don’t take our word for it though, we have plenty of material ready in case none of that pans out. 

While anyone can come up with an excuse or two, it takes a team of trained professionals to craft ones that are built to last. The ones we create at the Factory are designed to sustain a barrage of counterarguments and senseless hole-poking by tedious skeptics. 

We’ve certainly turned plenty of critics around by inviting them into our factory for a guided tour. Watching something as precise and delicate as an excuse being made from scratch gives even the most cynical person a window into a life of total freedom and self-determination. 

What we do here is streamline the excuse making process so everyone who enlists our help is buoyed by an arsenal of justifications they never would have come up with on their own. A satisfied customer recently missed a work related golf outing. By himself, he might have explained his absence was due to “feeling a little under the weather,” or the “sudden arrival of a long lost relative.” What we do at the Excuse Factory is get specific. That’s why we kidnapped his dog and held it hostage until the last tee was cleaned up, the last divot repaired. A regular excuse company would have merely told him to “use the old ‘my dog was kidnapped’ by a central European crime syndicate.” That wasn’t good enough for us. It helped our customer, so he wasn’t even lying when he wrote a teary email to colleagues about his lost retriever. Dog and man are reunited and we can safely report, only a tiny bit traumatized. 

A highly-touted major league baseball team, whose promise was equaled only by its payroll, called us up after a disappointing postseason. They wanted what we call “the works.” That meant weather excuses, astrological excuses, anything that got them off the hook for poor performance. Fans don’t want accountability, they want reasons to believe. If your excuse doesn't work, you can always blame us. 

You can do no wrong (if you hire us). Our only concern is if we get edged out by automation. But if that happens, you can imagine the long list of reasons we’ll give for our demise. Whatever happens though, one thing it won't be is our fault.