The no-show excuse

On this radio this morning, I heard about some (successful) excuses that some people have used to skip a day of work. One of them involved a person getting the day wrong.

How did the person do this? Supposedly, they went outside on Monday morning to collect the paper. When they did, they found that it was the Sunday paper; as a result, they thought the rest of the day was Sunday based on the newspaper. By the time they realised the real day, it was too late. They contacted their boss, who, believe it or not, accepted their excuse; they did not lose any sick days and it did not cut into their vacation time.

The boss must either have been an idiot or thought that the person was being creative and rewarded them with a free day off. After a little bit of thinking, the excuse doesn't hold up. For starters, the person would have to have forgotten to pick up their Sunday paper the day before. That's not unreasonable by itself, but then they would have to have woken up extremely early on the Monday to have picked up only the Sunday paper, otherwise the Monday paper would have arrived and they would have realised the day. Finally, they somehow dodged both contact with other people (who would have told them the day) and looking at any sort of calendar throughout the day.

What do you think, does the excuse hold? Is the boss an idiot or do you think it's possible that they gave the person the day off because they wanted to acknowledge any creativity involved? Please do let me know!