'Sorry my wi-fi's down' and other ways to lie about not working from home

JUST realised your boss emailed several hours ago asking you to do some pressing work? Fear not, here’s how to lie your way out of trouble.

Sorry, my wi-fi’s down

An absolutely bullet-proof excuse, the gold standard. If you’ve spent the morning dragging Kidderminster FC to the Champions League final on Football Manager instead of logging on to some ‘important’ meetings, simply say that your wi-fi’s down. You’ll be off scot-free – but remember to text and not email.

Your email went to spam

One for the courageous. Tell your boss that, for some reason, their email with those important spreadsheets ‘somehow got flagged as spam’. If anyone still believes this bollocks excuse, you’ve bought yourself a few hours of premium slacking-off time. Or the sack.

There was a power cut

These days, about 90 per cent of jobs are some nonsense to do with online marketing, and thus impossible to do by candlelight. What could you do, write a letter instead of an email? Just be careful no goody two-shoes colleague pipes up to say they live in the same area and their power’s fine.

I was taking in a neighbour’s shopping

If you stagger out of bed at noon to see that your boss tried calling while you were sleeping off your mid-week hangover, don’t panic. You were helping a struggling elderly neighbour take in a Tesco delivery. Even the stroppiest boss can’t hassle a good Samaritan like you.

My laptop crashed

Saying that your laptop crashed and it didn’t save an important document that you had definitely completed is a true lifeline of an excuse. Even more plausible if your office is notoriously cheap with their IT and has only provided you with some Windows XP relic to work from home with.

You’ve got a virus

At the very least, your boss will assume you’ve got a computer virus, effectively giving you a day off to sort it. If you’re feeling more ambitious, mumble wheezily and they might think you’ve got the actual virus, allowing you to milk several weeks of sick leave.

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'Side hustle' and five other phrases that need to f**k off immediately

DO you say any of these? Then everyone hates you. These popular but incredibly annoying phrases, like you, just need to f**k off forever:

Side hustle

People might be working different in the pandemic 20s, but ‘hustle’ is a pathetic attempt to sound cool. You’re not illegally importing truckloads of cigarettes from Europe, you’re actually selling ‘funky’ facemasks made from old knickers that bring in the huge sum of £3 a week.

All the feels

A social media favourite that doesn’t really mean anything, so can be used for any old crap. Heard We Belong Together on the radio for the first time this year? All the feels! Your sister posted a photo of your nephew dressed as a slapdash Hagrid on World Book Day? All the feels!

Cool beans

Frankly it would be better to just say “I am a wanker”. This expression, which makes someone sound like a very dull person trying to be ‘wacky’, makes you long for a time when people were strong and silent. Or language hadn’t been invented.

The narrative

Not long ago, the news media decided to start calling everything a ‘narrative’. Anything and everything, like prime ministers lasting five minutes, was ‘part of the ongoing narrative’. No, it was just an agonisingly embarrassing moment none of us will ever be able to forget, particularly when reminded by an article like this.

The optics

The sexy new cousin of ‘the narrative’ is ‘the optics’. It’s really just a way of saying something looks bad, so if your neighbour’s dog has just been run over by a bin lorry, pretentious types might like to say “The optics don’t look good”.

Now more than ever

This wasn’t too bad when used to emphasise the good work of nurses and others in lockdown. But now it’s in every advert on TV, spoken in a forlorn voiceover, set to sad piano music, as advertisers take punts on our mental states. Still, at least it’s not quite as horribly cliched as ‘the new normal’.

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