[edw519]

Cute story, but shitty management.

So you go to your boss with (a) unfinished work and (b) some accompanying data. He searches his manual database, looking for a match of your data, then "classifies" it as an excuse, not a reason. (After reading the entire post, I still don't know the difference.) He's so busy belittling you that he spends no time:

  a. trying to understand your data
  b. trying to separate causes and effects
  c. getting down to the root cause
  d. identifying systemic problems the enabled the cause
  e. fixing the current problem
  f. implementing systemic changes to prevent further instances
  

Here's my take:

My excuse is that the job will not get done.

The reason is that I got fired after shoving my boss's little book up his ass.