Collaborative Writing Project: Late for Work Excuse

I don't consider myself a writer but I came across an idea that sparked my interest. It's a collaborative writing project that originated from a surrealist technique in which "a collection of words or images are collectively assembled." This technique is called Exquisite Corpse. You can see a large example of this here where they are working on entire collaborative novels on the Internet. While I don't want to invest a lot of time doing the backend programming for such a project, I thought it would be fun and interesting to do on a small scale on this blog. If you're jonesin' to participate on a larger scale, go back here. You can even request to start your own novel/short story on that site.

Here's the deal.

Big picture: We're going to construct a short, collaborative writing project about a topic I describe below.

Instructions: We will start with two sentences, a first and last, which I'll provide. The next commenter will provide a sentence that fits between the two. Then I will post two sentences based on a preset random order in which case the next commenter will supply another sentence that fits in between. This will continue until the project is complete when I will compile the sentences and post the result.

At the beginning, don't worry about tieing the sentences together but try to do so once we get about halfway through (I'll let you know). Please, be creative and keep it relatively clean.

Topic: You're e-mailing your boss to give an excuse why you were late for work.
Length: 20 sentences

First sentence: Mr. Schmedlep, how awkward this must feel to the both of us.
Middle sentence: [ supplied by first commenter ]
Last sentence: I trust you can understand my predicament and won't hold this against me in light of my yearly review.