4

The Apology Jackhammer

An apology is a gesture of atonement. It's not money or LEGO; it doesn't get better the more you give someone. This doesn't stop some people from beating their victims with the clammy pillow of their contrition: "I'm sorry, no, I'm really sorry, I didn't know, really, I'm so sorry, sorry ..."

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"... and I'm sorry for gluing myself to your face to make sure you heard all my apologies and ..."

It's because they're not apologizing for your sake. They just can't handle the idea that anyone might not love them 100 percent at any given moment and will devote their entire empty skull to fixing this problem, that hollow chamber echoing the same apologies over and over again until you loudly assure them that they're perfect and you have no negative thoughts toward them. Even though they've now done multiple things to piss you off. And their idea of calming you down was mentally poking you with constant reminders of how they hurt you and how soul-piercingly annoying they are.

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APOLOGIES WILL CONTINUE UNTIL OUR MARRIAGE IMPROVES.

3

Apologizing for the Interruption

A phone ringing during a movie, play, talk or any other public gathering is no longer an embarrassing accident. It's how one person stands up to remove their pants and rub their balls/flange on the forehead of every single person present. Mobile phones are not new. This isn't Lord Dashery Boundingham rudely interrupting a good hand of whist by receiving a newfangled telegram. Walking into a cinema with your phone on is like shitting yourself in the seat: It's a function that all humans have known about for most of their lives, and only complete brain failure or staggering contempt for everyone else in the room would let them do it.

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"I get free snacks when other people leave them behind in disgust!"

It's psychopathic behavior. It reveals how they think the hundreds of other people present aren't real, just highly detailed wallpaper that covers the unimportant parts of their lives like a video game background.

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"No, it's cool, I think everybody else just freezes when I'm on my mobile. I'm like Zach Morris, but less sympathetic."

2

Sorry for Indecision

You're taking votes on Indian or Chinese for lunch, and can actually hear a co-worker's brain creaking under the strain as they grapple with this Gordian enigma. Overloaded mental gears grind and tear, screeching an error message that means "This unit is not rated to take part in regular human activities" but sounds like "Oh God, sorry, hang on, wait, let's see ..." The amount of processing time required is inversely proportional to the importance of the issue and directly proportional to the number of hungry people now seriously considering butchering and cannibalizing the idiot.

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"In the time it's taken him to draw a condiment flowchart, we could have barbecued him."

They're adding the apology to the crime, and every neuron spent spewing "sorry"s is another not employed to make the decision. And they clearly didn't have enough to resolve that imponderable conundrum in the first place. They couldn't give a less sincere apology without engraving it on a bullet. Apologies are meant to be about other people, but these fence posts simply cannot imagine the third option of "If I can't make a decision, maybe my own nonexistent preference is less important than the lives of everyone waiting for me."

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"On the one hand, there's me. The other hand is also used to masturbate."

1

Sorry Postscript

By far the worst and most common anti-apology is the postscript. You've choked out a "sorry," things have calmed down, and you can't help but sling one last barb. You might as well have spent the last five minutes yelling about the other party's sex with Satan, because the fight is back on, and you could have had some fun inventing new mythological matrimonial relations. An apology with a postscript is a box of chocolates that smells of urine: It doesn't just destroy the effort, it means they're more pissed off that you went to all that effort to do a good thing and then went to even more personal effort to ruin it.

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"They say you should put a lot of yourself into a gift."

The idea of "winning" an argument is the exact opposite of apologizing, and also why apologies are necessary. You can convince the other person in a discussion. When things move to argument mode, your personality is just a barnacle clinging on to the back of a huge white whale of territorial instincts and posturing, and the whale only wants to kill that bastard Ahab. Once things escalate to the argument stage, you really are in WarGames: The only winning move is not to play.

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This knows more about human emotions than you.

Get into a yelling match and you've handed over the controls of your modern brain to the monkey that lives one inch below your skin. And that monkey might now have access to an improved vocabulary and an impressive arsenal of psychological weapons, but its tactics haven't changed: screech loudly and fling shit at the opponent.

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Every time you've ever yelled, except he has an excuse.

If you're going to do anything, do it properly. Either apologize and stop talking, or down a Scotch, smash the bottle, set fire to the table and leap out the window. Either way, they'll admire your honesty and know better than to keep arguing with you, and you'll get some peace.

Luke also has a website, tumbles and responds to every single tweet.

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