Journal · Amsterdam · 2026-09-01
The Apology at the Top of the Message
A surprising number of first messages open with an apology of one kind or another, and the thing being apologised for rarely needs one. It is worth dropping, though not for the reason most people would expect.
Sorry to bother you. Sorry if this is a strange request. Sorry, I have never done this before. Sorry for the late hour. The opening apology turns up in perhaps one message in four, and after a few hundred of them the shape of it becomes clear: it is not politeness, it is a guest trying to get ahead of a judgement he is expecting.
What is being apologised for
Rarely the booking. Usually one of four things. That the request is unusual, which it is not. That the hour is inconvenient, which it is not, because the hours are the hours. That the guest is inexperienced, which is of no consequence to anyone. Or, most often on this site, that he would prefer not to talk much, which is the least demanding thing anybody asks for all week.
The common thread is an assumption that a preference has to be justified. It does not. A booking thread is an arrangement, not an application, and nothing in it is being assessed.
Why it is worth dropping
Not because it causes offence, which it obviously does not, but because it costs the guest something. An apology at the top of a message invites a reassurance in reply, and a reassurance invites an acknowledgement, and now a thread that could have been two messages is five. For a guest who wrote the apology because he finds this sort of exchange tiring, that is a poor trade.
It also changes how the rest of the message reads. A request that arrives pre-softened tends to get treated as tentative, and a tentative request gets a clarifying question rather than a confirmation. The blunt version is clearer and gets a faster answer, which is what the guest wanted in the first place.
The blunt version, for comparison
An address with a floor and a room number, a day and an hour in Amsterdam time, a length, a name from the roster or a line about the evening, and one sentence saying little talk and one lamp. Forty-odd words, no preamble, no explanation. It is not curt. It is complete, which is a different thing, and it reads as somebody who knows what he is arranging.
The late-hour apology in particular
Worth answering separately because it comes up constantly. A message at half past midnight is not an imposition and the hour on the clock changes nothing about the fee, the arrival window or the way the thread runs. There is no unsociable time to write, and a guest who sat on a message for two hours waiting for a more reasonable moment has simply spent two hours not booking.
The first-time apology
Also common, also unnecessary, and slightly misdirected. A first booking does carry one practical consequence, which is that half the fee goes ahead whatever the hour and however soon the session starts. That is the only sense in which a first booking differs from any other, and it is a piece of arithmetic rather than a matter for apology. From the second booking on, an hour or two at a city address later the same day needs nothing in advance at all.
What replaces it
Nothing. That is the point. The space at the top of the message is better spent on the floor number, which genuinely helps, than on a sentence managing an imagined reaction that is not coming. Nobody reading the thread is forming a view of you, and the quickest way to a short exchange is to write as though that were obvious.
The one apology that is not really an apology
There is a version worth distinguishing, because it is useful information wearing the wrong clothes. Sorry, the buzzer does not work after eleven. Sorry, the lift needs a card. Sorry, the floor number is not on the door. Strip the first word off each of those and you have exactly the sentence a booking needs, and it is the sentence most likely to be left out by a guest who is worried about seeming demanding.
Practical detail is never an imposition. The address, the floor, the room number, how the entrance works after dark and where the balance will be left are all things that make the evening go smoothly, and none of them requires softening. If an instinct to apologise is going to attach itself to something, it may as well attach to the parts that are worth writing.