"Sorry" - is it really such a hard word to say?

Had a rather interesting situation develop at work today, which led me to ponder why people seem to find a genuine, heart-felt apology so difficult.

A colleague has spent the past week running around trying to get some urgent documentation finalised, and yesterday, finally, was able to arrange a courier to take them away so that we could meet a deadline of this morning for returning them. Despite having checked the address herself, it was queried by the person booking the courier with someone else (i.e. not the person who'd asked them to have it couriered) and was told by that person that it could wait till tomorrow (i.e. today) to be sent. Throughout all this, my colleague was at her desk, and could have answered the question simply. Instead, she's had to make several highly apologetic phone calls, spend half her morning on the phone trying to work out how to get the documents to where they need to be today for less than $1k and has ended up having to jump on a train (round trip - nearly 7 hours) and take them herself.

Not ONCE have any of the people responsible for the decision not to send them (all of whom knew she was dealing with the matter) apologised. Not for the stress, inconvenience - nothing. Neither has anyone considered apologising to the person who had to have the documents today, or risk seeing their project collapse. My colleagues and I are all slightly dumbfounded - surely it's not too much to expect that if you stuff up (and stuff up badly) you might offer an apology??

These events lead me to thinking (you knew there would be a point, didn't you??) - in today's world, where so often we use "sorry" instead of "excuse me", have we forgotten that sometimes the best way to "fix" something is to offer an apology? By all means, do the other, tangible things as well - but sometimes the best you can offer is a genuine apology.