Tech is like that. Corporate email systems time and date stamp messages, and there are audit trails and log files that give the game away readily accessible on servers that the AITD crowd manage.
Some years ago, I heard of a dismissed worker who tried to take out a grievance against an employer. Unfortunately for the worker, the person had used the corporate email to slag off the employer with outside parties, and sought advice on how to get a grievance case going.
In other words, a good way to avoid disappointing outcomes in employment relations cases is to make sure that they never go near your organisation’s computers.
What works as a good techscuse though? Well, I have a love and hate relationship with the spam filtering in Microsoft Outlook.
On the one hand, it is able to drop the flood of messages from an el-cheapo PR agency in Singapore which loves to carpet bomb my inbox with irrelevant and boring stuff. Said PR agency does not respond to “for the love of god, stop sending me rubbish!” pleas, so a simple Outlook report-as-junk click sees the messages being dropped into the spam folder.
Now how do I know they’re there? You guessed it: Outlook every now and then gets it wrong, and routes legit messages to spam. Usually these unfortunate mishaps are discovered when someone is either hurt or angry that you’ve inadvertently ignored their important messages.
If they’re angry enough, you have to regularly monitor your junk mail folder which kind of defeats the purpose of spam filtering as you’ll see the unwanted messages.
That said, there is consensus among users that false spam positives happen. Therefore, “the spam filters ate your email” is a reasonably solid techscuse as long as you don’t overdo it, and out yourself as a technical nincompoop who can’t drive your email properly.
The best techscuses are the ones that don’t happen on your computer. They can be dramatic, like a data centre flooding with water short-circuiting countless servers, rendering them into instant e-waste.
If that happens, it’s a bit too close to the bone for your job security. Companies experiencing massive data and communications losses are liable to keel over and sink. If they don’t, it’s really expensive to fix that kind of damage. Despite the Great Resignation, an employer is likely to pick the second option of an ultimatum for a pay rise or a staffer will quit.
Spending a newly vacated salary on replacement IT infrastructure makes a great deal of sense for an employer in that situation.
A more subtle issue that’d give you the afternoon free to play tennis is an Internet service outage. The Internet sends data between networks using addresses stored in tables on what are essentially very expensive computers.
This is a little simplified but yes, they’re tables, and yes, the whole thing is not the most robust solution there is.
The expensive computers are called routers and unlike their metal-working namesakes, they crash all the time. When Covid-19 struck in 2020, one of the first things Internet providers and telcos did was to ban updates and configuration changes to routers. Because routers crash, and it was even harder to get them up and running again in lockdowns.
Internet outages are good middle-of-the-road techscuses that can be blamed on nameless techies getting monitor tans in network operations centres around the world. Their drawback is that they’re difficult to arrange for when you need a break.
If you can arrange them, you’re most likely a geek who has way too liberal access to tech that you shouldn’t touch as doing so tends to have severe legal consequences.
Since tech keeps track of what’s going on - if it didn’t, people would have no idea what the boxes to which they’ve outsourced their cognitive capacity to do - it’s probably best to be straight up and come up with plausible excuses.
Like, “I didn’t feel like looking at my emails and messages”. Except of course if that’s your actual job and you didn’t make sure the emails and messages would arrive on your computer until aprés le dèluge, to paraphrase a famous saying. If that’s the case, there’s no excuse.
