Excuses
Excuses, excuses...What is the lamest excuse you've ever given for something you've done?
In the early days of my apprenticeship, Mr. Brown assigned a fairly important project to me, trusting the design and creation of an officer's sword entirely to my hands for the first time. I was excited and nervous and eager to please him, so I rushed headlong into the job, filled with visions of overwhelming success. It was going to be the most beautiful sword anyone in Port Royal had ever seen. People would be talking about it for weeks, and envying the man who commissioned it. Soon I would have so many orders that I would have to branch off with my own shop, and I would no longer need Mr. Brown's mentoring.
I was so young then, and had no concept of the amount of work one sword would require. It was purely ego that drove me back then, and I was soon to learn that I had far to go before I would be ready to leave Mr. Brown. That first sword was my harshest lesson. The steel would not bend to my liking and the deicate work required for the hilt was beyond the limits of my still-awkward fingers. To put it simply, it was a disaster.
Frustrated with my failure, I let my temper take over and threw it into the forge. I tried to salvage it later, but too much of it had melted into the fire by then. Mr. Brown was furious when he saw the destruction and docked my pay for weeks to cover the cost of the lost steel. I suspect he never quite believed my excuse that the donkey had gone berserk and knocked the sword out of my hands and into the forge.
That was the last time I allowed my ego to rule my actions, and the last time I resorted to weak excuses to avoid taking responsibility for my mistakes. I have, however, made some rather poor excuses for Mr. Brown in recent years. Excuses for why he cannot personally deliver a piece, or why he is never in the shop (he usually is there, just passed out in the back). But those excuses are not for my own behavior, they're to protect my employer.
Why have I not left his employ now that I am capable of working on my own? I suppose I feel obligated to him for all he did for me when I was a boy. Or perhaps I feel sorry for him, or afraid of leaving the security of his smithy. All excuses, to be sure, but sometimes excuses are all you have.
In the early days of my apprenticeship, Mr. Brown assigned a fairly important project to me, trusting the design and creation of an officer's sword entirely to my hands for the first time. I was excited and nervous and eager to please him, so I rushed headlong into the job, filled with visions of overwhelming success. It was going to be the most beautiful sword anyone in Port Royal had ever seen. People would be talking about it for weeks, and envying the man who commissioned it. Soon I would have so many orders that I would have to branch off with my own shop, and I would no longer need Mr. Brown's mentoring.
I was so young then, and had no concept of the amount of work one sword would require. It was purely ego that drove me back then, and I was soon to learn that I had far to go before I would be ready to leave Mr. Brown. That first sword was my harshest lesson. The steel would not bend to my liking and the deicate work required for the hilt was beyond the limits of my still-awkward fingers. To put it simply, it was a disaster.
Frustrated with my failure, I let my temper take over and threw it into the forge. I tried to salvage it later, but too much of it had melted into the fire by then. Mr. Brown was furious when he saw the destruction and docked my pay for weeks to cover the cost of the lost steel. I suspect he never quite believed my excuse that the donkey had gone berserk and knocked the sword out of my hands and into the forge.
That was the last time I allowed my ego to rule my actions, and the last time I resorted to weak excuses to avoid taking responsibility for my mistakes. I have, however, made some rather poor excuses for Mr. Brown in recent years. Excuses for why he cannot personally deliver a piece, or why he is never in the shop (he usually is there, just passed out in the back). But those excuses are not for my own behavior, they're to protect my employer.
Why have I not left his employ now that I am capable of working on my own? I suppose I feel obligated to him for all he did for me when I was a boy. Or perhaps I feel sorry for him, or afraid of leaving the security of his smithy. All excuses, to be sure, but sometimes excuses are all you have.