What’s an excuse for not finishing my homework?

The Edge, September 12, 2009

There may come a time when you completely forget about an assignment and require a plausible excuse to stop your teacher from putting you in the naughty corner.

While I’m not suggesting you lie, I’d like to perhaps help jog your memory as to the reason you may have forgotten about the assignment, as forgetting why you forgot is something you’d rather forget, right? So here’s 10 possible reasons that may be applicable to your predicament:

1. Your dog ate your cat, who had eaten your fish, who had eaten a Post-It note that was a reminder to do the assignment.
2. You got confused and thought you were in a BC year and the assignment was due in an AD year.
3. You mistakenly thought the teacher was going to do the assignment and you were going to mark it.
4. You printed your assignment in lemon juice but can’t find it among all your other pieces of blank paper.
5. You thought you merely dreamt about the assignment and so never considered having to deal with it in real life.
6. You read in the Bible that we should forgive each other and thought you would test the Christianity of your teacher.
7. As a young child, your parents gave you a spoon to feed yourself. You ended up sticking a load of mashed banana in your eye and have since mentally blocked out any further tasks that are given to you.
8. You thought Jesus would have come back by now, so you never bothered starting it.
9. Your shoelace was undone.
10. With the speed of light and speed of sound being vastly different, at the time the assignment was handed out your brain misaligned the sights and corresponding sounds of receiving the assignment and ended up storing the memory in a parallel set of brain cells—which is also the repressed part of your brain that stores all the jokes your dad tries to tell your friends.

Fact: The definition of assignment, before schools existed, was the "metamorphosisum" of a person into a donkey. Later, this was changed to be associated with how you look when you hand in work on a subject you claim to be knowledgeable about but demonstrate a clear lack of knowledge—looking like a donkey as a result.