THE OTHER day, a young Argentinian journalist e-mailed a colleague asking whether she could interview him for an article she was writing. He replied: “Sure, call me at three.”

Three o’clock came and went, and the woman did not call. He wasn’t terribly surprised, as unreliability and rudeness aren’t terribly surprising.

However, 10 hours later, he received a second message from the journalist that went like this: “Apologies – I just had a baby! Totally ahead of time, but wonderful and healthy, and in a second! I hope we can do an interview when I’m back at work. Yours, Juana.”

This must be the best excuse ever provided for failing to make a phone call. Even though the image of a woman delivering a baby is a bit alarming, the excuse is prompt, polite, uplifting and leaves its author more than forgiven.

Juana’s story made me think about the nature of the perfect excuse, and made me recall some imperfect ones I’ve been offered recently. Last week, a woman phoned to say she couldn’t make a scheduled meeting as the childminder had broken her arm. I made sympathetic noises down the phone, but with my fingers crossed behind my back. Childcare problems are no excuse, at least not for professionals. Being a working parent means having back-up arrangements, and a back-up to the back-ups.

Worse, the previous week I was due to meet someone in a coffee bar who sauntered in 20 minutes late complaining the taxi driver wouldn’t take a credit card, so he had to go to the bank.

Most imperfect of all was a young man I employed to fix my computer at home who told me, as he walked through the door half an hour late, that he’d had a rough night, and could do with a coffee.

There needs to be a name for all this unreliability. I’m calling it WET, which stands for Weak Excuse Tendency. Sufferers from the tendency aren’t skiving or lying, they just have an inadequate notion of what it means to be reliable. WET can affect people of all ages, but the young are particularly susceptible to it – which is most unfortunate when you consider one in five graduates can’t find a job.

Employers often complain graduates lack basic skills in literacy and communication, but the more fundamental problem is that many of them suffer from WET. Universities don’t seem to grasp their role in this. They are belatedly flapping about installing pointless schemes to make graduates more employable.

Earlier this month, Dublin City University announced it was starting to teach students six “employer-friendly attributes”, including being “creative and enterprising, committed to continuous learning, solution-oriented, effective communicators, globally engaged and active leaders”.

I know a girl with a top degree from a top university who may well have all of these fluffy attributes, and is currently working as an intern. She casually mentioned to me that she hadn’t been able to go to her job every day because she’d had a cold, then had had to get a blood test, then had also needed to say goodbye to her sister, who was going off on her gap year. I inquired what her boss’s response to all this was. “She’s really chilled,” the girl said brightly.

I bet the boss was more than chilled. I bet she was icy, and only didn’t say anything because hardly anyone ever does. Indeed, employers are partly to blame for the WET epidemic. They have concentrated so much energy in pushing “employee engagement” and flexible working that they have gone soft on WET and the causes of WETness.

A start would be to sort out what is a good excuse and what is a WET one. It seems to me there are four hurdles that any decent excuse must clear.

First, it must describe a serious event. This rules out the sister’s gap year. Second, it must be unpredictable. This rules out the childcare excuse, as childcare problems of one sort or another are all too predictable. Third, it must be incompatible with work. This rules out the common cold, as mucus and memo writing can co-exist perfectly happily. And finally, it must be believable. This rules out the most popular excuse of them all: food poisoning, which though awful when true, is given so often as a lie that its excusing power is lost.

By contrast, Juana’s excuse passes all four tests. Giving birth is serious, it can happen unexpectedly early, and you can’t work and push at the same time. It is also believable: there’s a howling infant there to prove it.

And giving birth has another benefit that all the other decent excuses – serious illness, ash clouds, bereavements and so on – lack. It’s a miracle. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)