How to Blame Technology

Rafe Needleman
Caller Calls Back
Published in
3 min readJun 24, 2021

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The road to smooth interpersonal communication is filled with potholes of lies. We keep our friendships happy with fibs like, “Sorry I’m late, traffic was terrible.” We blame external forces for the small injustices we inflict on others. In exchange, we hope for the continuance of otherwise happy relationships.

Is it right to tell a lie? Under most moral codes, no, it isn’t. But etiquette is not about the absolute right. It’s about paving the way to good relationships, and sometimes that calls for deflection.

Communicating through technology gives us avenues to a lot of excuses. Here a few small ones we can use to plaster over, or end, awkward exchanges. Of course, none should be used frequently. If ever.

When you desperately need to get off a call and you can’t find a way to do so gracefully

Switch your phone to airplane mode while you’re in the middle of the call. This will drop the call with a “Call Failed” error showing up at the other end, unlike just hanging up. You can blame this on mobile technology, if it comes to that. And if the person you were talking to tries to call you back immediately, the call will go straight to voicemail, reinforcing your lie.

The gentler version of this is to say your phone is on 1% battery and about to switch itself off.

When your mind wanders on a phone call or Zoom chat and you realize you should have been paying attention

Easy. Blame the connection. “I’m sorry, you dropped out there for a few seconds. Could you say that again?”

When you don’t want to reply to a text message right away

Take your time to reply, and when you do, text, “Sorry, I was driving in traffic.” Nobody expects you to be paying attention to texts when you’re in a tight driving spot.

Some phones let you automatically reply to incoming texts with a “I can’t text now, I’m driving” message. There’s nothing to stop you from sending this message manually.

When you don’t want to turn on your webcam in a video call

You should never have to turn on your camera, which means you should not really need to find an excuse to keep your camera off, if, say, you’re still in your jammies for the morning meeting. But if you want to foist the blame to something external, you can say you’re having network issues and are keeping the camera off to save bandwidth.

When you don’t want to be in that meeting at all, for that matter

Just don’t show up. Later, say your connection failed. However, since most people working at home have two independent ways to connect a device — WiFi and cellular — this fib may not pass the smell test.

In some instances, you can instead blame security features, especially picky, corporate-grade security gateways. For example, you can say your phone died and thus you couldn’t receive a necessary verification code.

If you really want to put effort into blaming technology, you can use tech itself to make a Zoom connection so annoying nobody will mind if you drop off a call. See Zoom Escaper, which can add noise or distortion into your call.

When you missed replying to an email

There are so many “the dog at my homework” excuses for not replying to an email. You can say you never got it, or that it went to spam, or that your antivirus check quarantined it. You can also say that you sent your reply and leave it at that, sending the recipient on a scramble to check their spam folder. (Don’t actually do that.) You can say your reply was stuck in your outbox or that you mistakenly left it in drafts. Almost any of these face-saving claims can work, although technologically not all are plausible for all email programs.

In most cases, the best excuse is to simply send your response when you can, with an acknowledgement of the delay, such as, “Thanks for your patience.” Sometimes, it’s better to just make the human connection after all.

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