The worst excuse I have ever heard is:

[davies]

The wind blew the wrong way

 9/7%

Leaves on the line

 6/5%

The wrong kind of snow

 9/7%

Yes, but I didn't inhale

 20/15%

Categorically, er, no. Unless I was drunk at the time

 6/5%

The lines of Venus were in the wrong juxtaposition

 6/5%

No-one needs more than 640K of RAM

 47/35%

The dog ate my homework

 15/11%

It's my first day

 15/11%

133 total votes

[davido]

• I didn't change anything.
• It doesn't work.
• I already tried that.
• I found a bug in Perl.
• It was working yesterday.
• I don't need architecture because we just need to get it done quickly.

Update: A friend once told me he bought a system with a 100MB hard drive because that was bigger than all his neighbors' drives. Admittedly, at the time I was still swapping 3.5" floppies, often putting the contents of the first floppy into a ram disk on a system with 1MB RAM so that I could avoid all the swapping to run my PASCAL compiler. The poll option regarding 640KB RAM reminded me of this.

[dsheroh]

A friend once told me he bought a system with a 100MB hard drive because that was bigger than all his neighbors' drives.

The 640k RAM one similarly reminded me of when someone donated an old TRS-80 Model 12 to my high school, and they turned around and gave it to me. ("Well, we can either store it somewhere for a few years until we finally sell it at an auction for 50 cents... or we can ask Dave if he wants it.") In addition to being my first *nix system (Xenix, to be exact), it also included my first-ever hard drive, holding a whopping 12M. At the time, I was absolutely convinced that it would be all the disk space I would ever need for the rest of my life...

[ajt]

It was working yesterday or was not working yesterday but is working today may be feeble but I've come across it several times, especially on systems with lots of caches, so you have no idea what state the system really is in...!

[Zenzizenzizenzic]

I thought I was in dev!

[LanX]

Actually ... the first thing I achieved at my current $job was to drastically change the colors of different log-in environments.

Giving a visual clue helps!

update

especially when debugging in multiple windows.

[perldigious]

I'm not sure about worst excuse ever, but one I've heard a lot recently that's pretty awful is some variation of, "we just did what the data indicated." I actually first learned Perl to essentially do some low level Data Science type of stuff, but I quickly realized the individuals who were asking me to do it (middle managers and low level executives) weren't so much interested in finding out what the data said, but more so in figuring out which data to look at and which to ignore to reinforce their already formulated conclusions when they presented them up the chain of command (higher level executives) to indicate their department is doing a super great job, or whatever.

I got pretty tired of being asked to tweak little things, change how this is measured going forward, or update the calculation to include/exclude things to bolster the numbers in favor of some individual's argument.

I'm not in the same position under the same folks anymore (thankfully), but I still have this Dilbert tacked to my wall as a reminder.

[Eily]

"It can't be me I didn't touch that part" by someone who had made the only commit between the correct and buggy version.

[talexb]

Ugh. Reminds me of doing some testing of a 3201 (poll-select) communications system with (as it turned out) my ex-employer. There would occasionally be system failures, and one of them was explained away (during the Winter) as 'Snow on the lines'. I was gobsmacked. This was the last 90's. I had nothing.

Fortunately, there was a tech at ex-employer that I'd played hockey with, and he was totally on the ball. When I had him on the phone with a problem, I got it solved right away. So at least there were *some* competent people there. That was a weird period of employment -- leading a major communications project with a company that had .. laid me off as being 'below standard'. Huh.

[ambrus]

"The system doesn't allow me to do that." Where "system" refers to whatever crappy software they're using.

[afoken]

"But it works on my machine!"

Alexander

[Perlbotics]

Best portrayed by Disaster Girl.

[syphilis]

"But it works on my machine!"

Could perhaps also be construed as "The best excuse I ever heard" ??
Dunno ... ;-)

Cheers,
Rob

[thezip]

Being in the military at one time, I was accustomed to hearing "That's above my pay-grade", or worse, "That's beneath my pay-grade!"

[LanX]

• Of course did I test my changes to our framework!

  ( "Hey, I started the web-app once and it still looked the same..." )

[QM]

It works for me

I only changed a comment.

It's a Lunar Phase Dependency.

[Eily]

It's a Lunar Phase Dependency.

One debugger I used actually had an option to display the phase of the moon :). And actually that debugger (which was otherwise quite good) had a bug that made the execution misbehave when stepping over some instructions under specific conditions. As you might guess, I was using the debugger trying to find a bug, so I ended up with what I thought was a single bug that was behaving differently depending on how close I was trying to observe it. Lunar Phase Dependency alright.

[hippo]

what I thought was a single bug that was behaving differently depending on how close I was trying to observe it

This is known as a Heisenbug.

[LanX]

• Being blonde

[bliako]

security

I don't know if this is the worst, most irritating or the best excuse ever!

[marto]

It's perhaps one of the best, while frustrating I think your SMBv1 issue seems like more of a policy/lack of investment in infrastructure issue.

[Laurent_R]

This must be due to bit decay.

[davies]

Too late for the original poll, but I feel the Monasteriat would wish to know the latest: It was the tree's fault (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8603783/Workmen-erect-street-light-middle-TREE-bosses-blame-tree-blunder.html).

Regards,

John Davies

Update 2021-12-09: And we have another contender: the wrong kind of wind. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10290621/Wrong-kind-wind-blamed-blackout-left-thousands-families-without-power-week.html

Update 2022-01-15: Another one: the wrong kind of sunlight. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10404837/Now-train-operators-blame-wrong-kind-SUNLIGHT-rail-chaos.html

Update 2022-04-07: The wrong kind of air. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10695233/Cracks-Hitachi-Class-800-trains-caused-excess-movement-salt-corrosion.html

[syphilis]

Seems a bit unfair for the article to describe the workmen as "bungling" when they were probably only doing exactly what they had been asked to do.
The Council probably realized that the workmen's actions were beyond reproach - which is the reason that they had to blame the tree. (No other alternative !!)

Donald would be proud of the Council's response.

Cheers,
Rob

[stevieb]

"There was an imminent threat!"

...or, in my case...

"I was watching Canada play for international hockey gold!"

[Lotus1]

My cat was sleeping on my weighted blanked so I couldn't get out from under it.

[zentara]

Cosmic rays affecting non-ECC memory chips. :-) Fakes almost everyone out.

[jdporter]

It was [already] on fire when I got to it.

[bliako]

because you are free / because you have free will

[LanX]

• It's in Perl! (shrug)