"I'm busy, I have no time."

I'm not a big fan of lame excuses, especially because they are so obviously bogus, that it's really embarrassing, but it's hard to get around them, so sometimes I am compelled to use them. Today I was thinking which one is the lamest. I came to the conclusion that it must be the

"I'm busy, I have no time" excuse.

It's probably the easiest way to tell someone indirectly that you don't want to meet up. Because that's what I feel someone is trying to tell me. And that gets confirmed when I ask the follow-up question "How about tomorrow?" and the answer is "Busy, too." Everybody is always busy, always working, never has time. How can that be? I know I'm not always busy and I use this excuse when I don't want to meet with someone, ergo, others must be using the same trick as me. Simple as that.

Well, worse than the people who use this lame exuse are the people who just don't understand it or just don't care. I have a friend who's like that. He will ask: "So what are you doing?" Because I know him well, I usually prepare some extra excuses in advance and I'd usually answer: "We're doing something around the house, then I need to drive my sister somewhere and after that I have to go and buy something." That's enough to save me - one day! Because he won't stop there. No, no. He will usually go on with "What about the next day?" It gets tougher to find excuses for the day after, but I can manage, if I am in good form. But when he adds "What about the day after?" for the next 3 or 4 days, I usually run out of excuses and give in and meet with him eventually, even if I don't really want.

So why are we doing this? Why can't we just say to the person: "Sorry, I don't want to meet up with you any time soon, because your stories bore me, you don't interest me at all and I feel like I'm wasting my time." We don't want to break up the friendship, but we also don't want to be so close with somebody. Mostly, we just expect that the person can read between the lines, when we say "I'm busy, I have no time" and just leave us alone until we are in the mood to meet. Time passes and finally it's our turn to ask "Hey, do you want to meet?" And if there's some unwritten karmic law, the person will answer:

"Sorry, I'm busy, I have no time."

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