Be honest.....have you ever given a completely bullshit technical explanation to a customer or your boss to cover the fact you or somebody else has screwed up?

No. I'm playing with all my cards open. I expect mutual trust between all the parties and lying or telling them what you think they want to hear is not how trust is established.

If you fuck up - that's a mistake. Mistakes happen, everyone makes them, everyone understands this. If you hide your mistakes then they don't see them. It makes you suspicious as they can only speculate how bad everything is, how far would you go the wrong way to hide your mistakes.

If you make a mistake and ack it by announcing it to relevant parties - well this says smth. To me it says you are mature enough to work towards common goals, not just yours. To me it says that you are responsible for what you do and you are not afraid to own your mistakes and commit to correcting them. The sooner you announce them - the happier everyone is.

Imo hiding, lying, postponing and other fishy behaviour is toxic to mutual trust, whether other parties find out or not. You do that long enough and you will start wondering: if you have gotten away with your fuckup, what fuckups have they hidden? Effectively neither you are trusted nor can you trust others in the game.

I never tell lies [except for "where were you?" when I was making a surprise for someone - this kind of lies I find justifiable]. That's the truth. Last time I told lies when I still was a teen.

It wasn't a mistake but the client was always unreasonable so I gave them a bullshit explanation to make sure they wouldn't call the disruption line about this again in my on-call weekend.