Excuse pre-loader

The footballer who shows up with a “slight hamstring strain”; the worker who is locked in a daily battle with her childcare or who is regularly snookered by the same train timetable that others manage without fuss, is an excuse pre-loader.

The art of managing expectations by explaining, before something goes drastically wrong, the extenuating circumstances which will make this turn of events, if it is indeed the way the events turn, inevitable. While these extenuating circumstances will never include ones own rank incompetence, at a greater level of abstraction excuse pre-loading speaks to, and from, a well of deep insecurity. From there it articulates a deeply-buried intuition that one’s own acumen leaves something to be desired.