Whenever you make up an excuse, how legit is it? What about excuses that come from your friends, etc.? Did the dog really eat their homework? Maybe not, but is there some truth to it? Read on to find out!
To try to figure out how much of an excuse is complete gobbledygook and how much actually has some truth to it, we have to first break up the excuse into parts (if some of these are confusing, don't worry; I'll be explaining them later). Here are the three main components to every excuse/things you should consider whenever you hear an excuse:
- Your relationship with the person who's telling you the excuse
- The person's history with this sort of event (ex: they "lost" their homework but they never do it anyways)
- What the excuse blames (ex: time, money, another person)
Based on these factors, I've created a 100% foolproof mathematical formula to decide how legit your friend's/family member's/coworkers' excuses are. Here's how it works:
1. Assign a value from 1-5 to represent how close you are with the person who's giving you the excuse. (1 being total strangers, 5 being inseparable). This basically is how much you trust them. Call this value A.
2. Assign a value from 1-3 to represent how the person usually deals with situations like these (1 meaning they always lie, 3 meaning they usually never make excuses for situations like so). Call this value C.
3. Assign a value from 1-10 based on what the excuse revolves around (from 1 representing something wacky, 10 representing something realistic). Call this value B.
The formula for how legit an excuse is then:
Possible values range from 0 to about 6.5. The higher the value, the more truthful the excuse.
What does this look like? Here's an example:
Excuse: A hard-working employee that's worked with you for three years can't come to work today because their child has a doctor's appointment. You've also noticed that every two weeks or so, they haven't been coming because of various appointments.
Evaluation:
- A: You know the employee works hard, and has worked with you for quite a while. They aren't absent that often, so you let A = 7.
- C: Whenever the employee is absent, it's because of an appointment. This probably means that the appointment excuse is invalid, but you can't be sure, so you let C = 2.
- B: The excuse revolves around a child's appointment, which is pretty realistic. You let B = 9
- The final result you get is about 5.5, meaning that though the excuse may have some fiction in it, the employee's history makes up for it.
Where does this formula come from? I weighted trust and prior experience over the actual excuse, because that's really how we evaluate excuses. If we someone who know won't lie to us, it doesn't matter what they say, we're likely to believe them. I also converted everything to a logarithmic scale because it makes things easier to compare.
Disclaimer: this post is made for fun, not to go around wondering if people are lying to you. Use it for funny excuses, but don't get too caught up. At the end of the day, what matters is that you trust people, and don't break that bond :).
I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of excuses. Want more math-ish posts? Science-y ones? Tell me below!
