When I was younger, I had the impression that people said "sorry" way too quickly and weren't sincere about it. So I set myself a goal for one year to not use t

When I was younger, I had the impression that people said "sorry" way too quickly and weren't sincere about it. So I set myself a goal for one year to not use the literal word "sorry", instead using word and deed to apologize. In one particular case I still remember, a batch job I had set up had failed to run, and an entire department couldn't do their work properly the next day; during the "no literal sorry" year! Instead of just saying "sorry" and being done, instead I was forced to come up with something more: * "Oh no, that's terrible! We were anticipating this issue due to <reasons> and were already partially mitigating it" * "Additional QA will likely lead to diminishing returns, but we can still add extra testing time to our daily batch update, at least it can't hurt" * "Did you know your sysadmins can manually continue the job if this occurs? Send one of them over and I'll show them how!" Apologizing 'properly' with or without the word "sorry" is hard, but can be done. You need to show that a) you are aware of the problem/mistake and recognize it. b) you are acting to prevent the problem from happening again. c) you are (willing to) engage with the other party and empower them where possible.