As an employer, I’ve heard my share of excuses.
“My car wouldn’t start.” “One of my kids is sick.” “I forgot to set my alarm.” “I was sick all night with the flu.”
Some good, some not so good. And there are the ones you keep hearing over and over, like the one about the car not starting. After awhile, after you think you’ve heard them all, you get to the point where you don’t want to hear them anymore. You start to think, “You forgot to set your alarm? How can you forget to set it when you know you have to get up to go to work every day? I thought you wanted a job when you came here. I’m not really interested in your problems. I have problems of my own, and one of them is to run this business. I can’t do that if you aren’t here every day.”
But then there are the valid excuses. There is a huge difference between, “I forgot to set my alarm,” and “My house caught fire at 5 this morning.” And of course, there are myriad other reasonable excuses. And when I heard one that I thought was reasonable, I was always willing to accept it.
Now, I don’t usually write about political issues, but I’m starting to have a problem with some of the critics of President Barack Obama. Did I vote for him? Yes, I did. Am I a little disappointed with his overall results so far? Yes, I am. Will I vote for him again in 2012? I’ll have to get back to you on that.
But I’m also getting more than a little tired with the pundits who do nothing but criticize his results and say that he is supposed to be in charge and that he was “hired” to fix whatever problems come along. They criticize him when he tries to explain that part of his poor economic record is due to the Gulf oil blowout, the Japanese tsunami, the Arab spring, the Greece situation, the European financial crisis, the Oklahoma tornadoes and the North Dakota floods.
Were any of those situations caused by something that he did? They sound like reasonable excuses to me. How about you? What would you have him do about a Japanese tsunami followed by a nuclear meltdown that had almost immediate results on the supply chain of automobile parts to the United States and caused industry layoffs? Did he cause them or did he inherit them? What should he have done in that situation?
I hate excuses, but I hate even more the people who are quick to criticize but have no solutions to offer. (George Will, please take notice.)
Now I’ll get down from my soapbox, and it will be a long, long time before I ever “get political” again — I promise.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. The opinions and comments in this column are his alone and do not represent the opinions or policies of any outside organization. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Click here for previous Paul Burri columns. Follow Paul Burri on Twitter: @BronxPaul
Comments
