Spy School Oneshot Collection

Throwing Everyone Else Under the Bus

A far from exhaustive list of times that Alexander deflected blame from himself.

1. While in Pakistan, Alexander stopped an assassination by tripping over his untied shoelace and distracting assassin. Well, that stopped it for about five seconds. While Alexander was sprawled out on the ground his partner knocked the assassin unconscious. However, Alexander didn't notice this and threw a shoe in the general direction of the assassin and accidently hit his partner in the head, giving him a concussion. (It was a very hard shoe.) Alexander switched their roles in his write-up of the mission. He then suggested that the guy he was on the mission with ought to learn how to tie his shoes better.

2. Alexander got into a car accident in Germany once. Turns out he really wasn't paying that much attention on the Autobahn because one second he was on it and the next second he wasn't. He was fine. The tree he hit was not. Alexander still blamed the tree. Somehow he got away with it.

3. Alexander fell down a hill while watching a secret meeting of two diplomats in France. Luckily he lost his binoculars while rolling down the grass, but he still had to explain why he had suddenly crashed into the diplomats' meeting. Alexander claimed that he had just been out for a stroll when a cat had startled him. And then he ran away, still managing to trip three times before he was out of sight.

4. While staying at a hotel in Moldova, Alexander accidently ran a pair of pants with some explosive in the pocket through the hotel's washing machine. It blew up. Alexander tried to pretend that the pants weren't his, then blamed everything on the washing machine, saying that it had clearly malfunctioned and that he might sue. He did not sue. But also, he did manage to not be blamed for the destruction of the hotel's property.

5. Alexander went roller skating once. It turns out that balancing on skates is not one of his strong suits. After falling approximately twenty times in his first lap of the skating floor, Alexander took his rental skates back up to the counter and berated the teenager there for clearly trying to sabatoge his upcoming missions by injuring him. Confused, the worker came very close to calling the police.

6. Like many others, Alexander often blames people for distracting him while playing games and sports such as (but certainly not limited to) darts, bowling, and golfing.

7. While driving in France, Alexander's car broke down. Clearly this was the fault of the president of France for having bad roads. And bad cars. And not teaching Alexander how to jumpstart a car.

8. As a kid, Alexander lost a number of Easter egg hunts. One time he blamed malicious bunnies for moving the eggs around during the hunt so that they would be in places Alexander had already checked.

9. After a questionable call in a little league game, Alexander claimed that the baseball umpire was in cahoots with the mafia.

10. While undercover in a zoo, Alexander left a cage open. When a snake got loose and the reptile house had to be closed for the day while a team of people recaptured the snake, Alexander blamed a lousy lock that the snake must have picked to escape. When it was pointed out that snakes do not have hands, Alexander tried to play it off as a joke, then vowed not to set foot in a zoo for the next decade. He's scared of most animals anyway, so this wasn't exactly a big sacrifice.

11. While meeting with agents at his house, Alexander was not supposed to tell them his actual name. Instead he was supposed to be Jordan Aster, just some random normal government worker with some specific job that Alexander could never remember. he also clearly couldn't remember his fake name, because he introduced himself as Alexander. When writing up the report on the failure of the meeting to his superiors, Alexander claimed that it was Catherine who had called him Alexander.

12. He blamed a rogue penguin holding its breath for his very original joke not working. People thought that him blaming the penguin was the joke. It wasn't, but Alexander went with that anyway.

13. Alexander blamed an evil bus driver for making him leave his files on the bus because Alexander was too busy taking down the bus driver to remember his briefcase.

14. While on a mission in Russia, Alexander took some very blurry surveilence photos to send back to the CIA. Instead of just admitting that he was not exactly a great photographer, Alexander blamed lousy CIA technology for not letting him know that his thumb was covering the lens in half the pictures.

15. He once blamed jet lag for falling asleep in a meeting that included, among others, the director of the CIA and the president of the United States. He hadn't been on a plane in a month, but it wasn't like everyone else knew his travel schedule. It was still a little embarrassing, though. Just a little.

16. Claimed Erica must have been cheating at Monopoly and taking money from the bank while he was in the bathroom. She wasn't. Alexander is just bad at Monopoly. Though Erica would have crushed him by even more in Monopoly Cheaters Edition.

17. Alexander managed to get roped into running a 5k for CIA agents and their families because the agency thought it might make them look good to show their employees doing something that didn't involve overthrowing foreign governments. Alexander was never a particularily fast runner, so it was no surprise to him that he came in nearly last place with a time of 45 minutes. Luckily before he even started Alexander had come up with the excuse that the course was poorly marked and that he had gotten lost and that he was only sweating so much because of the high humidity. No one really bought his excuse of having gotten lost, but no one was willing to risk their reputation by refuting Alexander's claims. Well, except for Erica, but she was only four at the time, so it wasn't like anyone cared what she thought. Erica had been running the race too and had finished in half the time that Alexander had. Catherine, who had only been going as fast as Erica had been so as not to raise any suspicion by beating everyone, just said nothing when Alexander ranted about a sign with an arrow pointed the wrong way the whole car ride home.

18. While attempting to teach Erica how to ride a bike Alexander discovered that he wasn't actually very competent on a bike either. He then blamed bike manufacturers for working with hospitals to increase injury rates to make more money. Erica had to deflate Alexander's wheels to get him to stop trying to show that, unlike the first fifty or so tries, he could actually ride a bike. You know, it was just the thought of those evil bike manufacturers that was screwing him up. After slashing her father's tires, Erica sent him back home to get band-aids and tegaderm while she actually figured out how to ride a bike, managing to be perfectly balanced by the second try.

19. Alexander was never very good at languages, so he blamed bad teachers for his embarrassing mistakes. It clearly wasn't Alexander's fault that he thought Kircheand Kirsche meant the same thing. And just because that particular mishap had him going thirty minutes in the wrong direction because he thought he was looking for a giant statue of a cherry to turn at instead of a church doesn't mean that it was Alexander's fault either, ok?

20. Alexander greatly misinterpreted what Brexit was referring to and thought the UK was physically leaving Europe. He then blamed the European Union and the UK for trying to create mass panic by threatening to tamper with tectonic plates. It is not clear that Alexander actually knows what tectonic plates are, but when has that stopped him before?