Seeking a foolproof excuse

What I need right now is a foolproof excuse specific enough to extricate me from an awkward meeting but vague enough to sound truthful regardless of the facts.

Last week, for instance, I excused myself from a meeting by saying I have a family thing, which was true enough as long as no one asked for more details about the family thing: an opportunity to eat dinner with my husband, who, like me, has a lot of evening meetings, so some weeks we see each other only at breakfast and bedtime. It's true that I could have stayed at the meeting and let him wait at the restaurant a little longer, but my meeting had already dragged on for an hour without showing any signs of coming to a conclusion and if I'd sat there any longer my head might have exploded, and who would clean up the mess?

But I can't claim to have a family thing every week, and I no longer have small children at home to justify all those great kids-and-their-busy-lives excuses. A pet might help. Frequent vet visits would lose their plausibility fairly quickly, but I can imagine standing up at a meeting and saying Sorry, but someone's got to walk the dog. A true statement, especially if I don't specify who that someone might be.

I need to go sounds urgent enough, but at some point someone is bound to ask why and then things can get dicey. I can't say Sitting in that meeting was making me want to stab out my eyeballs with a dull pencil--even if it's true! Nobody appreciates that kind of honesty, and besides, we all have to bear our share of the burdens of adulthood, including sitting through an uncertain quota of awful meetings. What makes me think I'm so special?

So I try to hoard my excuses for when they're really necessary. I sit through meeting after meeting dutifully doing my part in keeping the wheels of academe spinning, even when I wish someone would just pull the brake lever and let me off. But one of these days I'll need to miss a meeting for no good reason, and when that time comes, I need to be prepared with something more compelling than I need to go.