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 uselessness or incompetence, at a greater level of abstraction excuse pre-loading speaks to, and from, a well of deep insecurity from which the drone of a deeply-buried intuition, that one is really a bit hopeless, booms and echoes.