automated apologies: for when you don't care anyway

So I am riding the subway this morning, 10 minutes behind schedule.  I take out my cellphone to email my boss, to tell him that I'll be a bit late for our meeting.  I type so much into my phone in Japanese, finish the first sentence and scroll a space over to write the next.  But I don't have to write much else, because the bottom of the screen is suddenly filled with 5 or 6 different ways to say I'm sorry, one of which even includes a bowing smiley.  I guess the character for "late" tipped my phone off that an apology would be in order.  I choose the first expression on the list and within two clicks my mail is sent.  This is great, because I'm not feeling very sorry anyway.  Japanese is so ritualistic and routine that a well-trained robot could speak it far more properly than I do, and perhaps even more politely than Japanese people themselves.  And yet, this hardly takes into account the fact that the Japanese almost never mean what they say outright.