What’s the most unbelievable reason someone has given for being late? – 17 strange but true excuses

If you’ve ever slept through an alarm, you know how stressful it can be to make up for lost time and get to work promptly. And while it’s embarrassing, at least it’s believable.

Pity the poor souls then who are late due to strange, ridiculous events.

Redditor u/Tiexandrea wanted to hear who they’ve struggled to make people believe their tall tales, so they put the following question to the good people of r/AskReddit:

‘What’s the most unbelievable excuse someone gave for being late, but later turned out to be true?’/blockquote>

Believe it or not, here are the top answers…

1.

‘My coworker called in dead-serious saying he’d be two hours late because an escaped herd of emus from an illegal local farm had surrounded his Prius and refused to let him reach the driver’s side door, which I naturally assumed was a hungover hallucination until he walked into the breakroom and silently airdropped a forty-second video of an enraged six-foot bird aggressively pecking his side mirror.’
-Content-Lychee-3420

2.

‘Had a teacher tell us he would be absent the next week because he had to go to Arkansas to “cook meth” for the cops.

Teaching was his side job, his primary job his regular job was as engineer for an environmental cleanup company. He was going to show Arkansas cops what to look out for when entering a meth cooking house. From his description the methods used to cook meth in Arkansas were very likely to result in an explosion.’
-darkofnight916

3.

‘One in our friend group said no to attend an event with the reason ”sorry I’m dead”

She was having routine surgery and joked about it. We even started a collection for ”funeral flowers” to give her after the surgery.

She died.

Pulmonary embolism.’
-GlitteryCakeHuman

4.

‘I had an employee call out because they were “hit by a helicopter.” And yes she was actually hit by a helicopter that crashed. The kicker, leadership complained to me about it and asked if time off was actually necessary. I had to explain that getting hit by a helicopter is indeed a fair reason to call out.’
-GildedGunderson

5.

‘One of the pharmacy techs I worked with no-called no-showed to work one morning, on a day that the weather was absolute shit. Snow, sleet, so nasty and icy and slick.

One of the other girls said, “She better be in a ditch somewhere.”

Well…not so funny story, turns out she had slid off the road and landed in a ditch. She even had a nasty concussion, and her phone broke.

So, she really WAS in a ditch somewhere. Our pharmacy manager told the other girl to be careful what she wished for.’
-Madame_Kitsune98

6.

‘My husband’s colleague was once late for work because there had been an accident on the main road involving a lorry that was transporting a cargo of instant mashed potato. Lorry turned over, cargo spilled, it rained, and… well, you get the gist.

“Sorry, I’ll be late for work because there’s mashed potato all over the A64” sounds like the worst excuse in the world until you see the pictures.’
-AliceCorgi

7.

‘I knew someone who kept saying she was late to a play rehearsal because an albino peacock was blocking the road. This was before cell phones so she couldn’t get a picture. No one believed her until she was giving someone a ride near her home and they got blocked on the road by an albino peacock.’
-AQuixoticQuandary

8.

‘“I just got a call from the abandoned hedgehog rescue agency that they have a hedgehog available for adoption and I need to go pick him up today, so I will be late getting to work.”

They provided sufficient documentation (hedgehog pictures).’
-ThadisJones

9.

‘He didn’t even need to give an excuse cause he was the boss, but he said he flipped his car… and showed up like 4 hours late in the same car that clearly had been flipped. Deer jumped out in front of the car in front of him and because he was trying to avoid the car in front of him, somehow he flipped his car (some kind of sedan.)’
-gogogadgetdumbass

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