Sorry, quick one

You're in the doorway at work and someone comes through the other way and walks into you. "Sorry," you say. They were the one who wasn't looking. At your desk the first email of the day opens "Sorry to bother you," and it's to a colleague whose job is to answer that exact question. In the meeting you have a thing to say and it comes out as "Sorry, can I just," and the thing gets said, and it was a good thing, and it arrived apologising for itself. At lunch the food is slow and when it comes you say sorry to the waiter for having asked where it was. You've got a cold and you say sorry for coughing. Dev, at the next desk, asks the same colleague the same sort of question at eleven, and opens with "Quick one," and gets the answer, and nobody thinks anything of it.

These are invented but I'd guess yours is close. Count, if you can bear to, and most people who count find the number before lunch is somewhere between twenty and forty, and that not one of them was for anything they'd done wrong. The doorway wasn't your fault. The question was your job. The cold was a cold.

Some words. I'll call a sorry that isn't for a fault the reflex sorry, and a sorry that is, the real sorry. A fault is something you actually did wrong. The sorry that opens a question or request, "sorry, quick one", "sorry to bother you", I'll call the softener. The sorry about things nobody caused, the rain, the queue, the late food, I'll call the weather sorry. What people conclude about you from all of this I'll call the read. The count from a day is the day's sorries. Replacing sorry with thank you, which will turn out to be most of the method, is the thanks swap. What you count as an offence, which is the thing this habit really is, I'll call the threshold, and I'll credit the researchers who use that word in chapter 4. And the exchange of a little competence for a little warmth that every apology involves, I'll call the trade, and credit that too.

Before you go on, do one thing. Tomorrow, count the day's sorries. A mark for each one, on paper or your phone. Then, next to each mark, a second mark if it was for something you actually did wrong. Don't change anything. Most people who do this find the first column long and the second nearly empty, and the gap between them is the habit, and it's the subject of this book.