The Lost Art of the Apology

A few weeks ago, I got a voicemail from a colleague from another firm. “Hey, give me a call when you get a chance.” I assumed it was going to be another call walking through problems on the jobsite that weren’t getting solved. Again. I was tired of talking about the project. Tired of repeating myself. The kind of tired that keeps you awake at night because things that should be simple aren’t getting resolved quickly.

When I called him back, he said something I didn’t expect. “I just wanted to say thank you. And… I’m sorry.” That stopped me.

For months, I’d been trying—gently at first, then less gently—to explain that his firm was hemorrhaging money on a project. What he thought was his A-team onsite was, in reality, the C-team at best. I kept saying, You’re not seeing what’s happening out here. He kept saying, I trust my guys.

That disconnect finally peaked one afternoon on site. Six of us were standing in a yard discussing where one surveillance camera should go on the side of a garage.

Two owners

A project manager

Two employees

And me.

I explained exactly where it needed to be. As the client rep. As the systems designer. Clearly. Calmly. One by one, each guy from their firm chimed in. “That’s too hard.” “Why don’t we put it here?” “I’ve got an idea—what about over there?”

Six people.

One camera.

Over Thirty minutes.

At some point, my brain drifted to the 1994 movie Swimming with Sharks. Buddy, the ruthless producer, delivering that brutal line: “If they can’t start a meeting without you, that’s a meeting worth going to.” All I could think was, Why am I talking to five people who don’t need to be here? The project manager should hear the instruction, nod, and figure out how to make the hard thing happen. That’s literally the job. Instead, we were crowd-sourcing avoidance.

And then I lost it. I’m not proud of it, but it happened. I said, “Life is fucking hard. Not all things are easy. I need the guy in your company who can do the hard shit. Where is he? I want him here to fucking do this and stop wasting all of our time.”

Dead silence followed. One of the younger guys—late 20s maybe early 30's—walked away and was clearly done with the situation. The owners got my point, and the camera went exactly where I had said it should go. Which makes it even funnier that the client, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, later decided to add lights that forced us to move the camera anyway.

Afterward, I did what felt necessary. I walked the site and apologized to everyone. I said I was wrong to blow up, wrong to yell, and wrong to swear. One guy said, “Don’t worry about it.” Another said, with his boss standing right there, “Our boss does it all the time.” We all laughed.

Then I found the kid who had walked away. I gave the same apology and looked him directly in the eye. He said, “You better had.” I paused, then said it again clearly and calmly. “Again, I was wrong. I’m sorry.” He replied, “Don’t ever talk to me again.”

That one stuck with me—not because I was offended, but because I was confused. Here was a sincere apology with no qualifiers, no excuses, no spin, and it just… bounced. I walked off the site wondering what the hell that was.

So when I called the owner back he actually called to thank me—and to apologize after discovering significant losses tied to what was happening on that project.

When he apologized, I could finally breathe. I accepted it, and just like that, we were good. The tension that had been sitting between us for months quietly disappeared. What surprised me wasn’t the apology itself, but how much it stayed with me afterward.

What stayed with me wasn’t the job, the money, or even being right. It was how rare that moment felt—someone owning a mistake, saying it out loud, and not trying to soften it or explain it away. Just a clean, direct apology. And how good it felt, for both of us, to let it land.

Which is a shame, because when they’re real, apologies are powerful—for the person saying them and for the person hearing them. We all screw up. We all lose our cool. We all misjudge situations. Owning it doesn’t erase what happened, but it changes what happens next.

Most of the time, that’s enough. Not dramatic. Not perfect. Just human.