I once called in sick and went to the horse races with a new girlfriend. I won $110 on a $2 exacta ticket, and the beer never tasted better than on that day I played hooky.
In the days before cellphones, I once went out at lunchtime to visit some friends. After a quick bite they invited me to visit their office. While we were going up in the elevator, it sailed past their floor and kept going right to the top of the building where it got jammed in the pulley. We were stuck there for nearly an hour, before being rescued by the fire brigade.
My boss was absolutely livid, and didn’t believe me at all, though it was the absolute truth.
Ooh, I forgot this one. I had a friend call into work for me because it was much cheaper than making a call from Canada to the office myself. So what did she say. “Carnut won’t be in the office today because she got stuck in a blizzard with my husband.”
::::note to self: avoid that shampoo!!::::
I once should have called in - or at least shampooed a few more times - because of how my hair smelled, but it was olive oil… see, my daughter brought home head lice from summer camp, I’d caught 'em before we figured out the problem, and we found that soaking the scalp/hair in oil and nit-combing worked better than the official anti-lice products, but removing the oil required several rounds of shampoo each day. I didn’t notice it until I was sitting at my desk and realized that evidently two rounds had NOT been enough that day.
In high school, I actually called in sick so that I could go see Paul Tibbets, captain of the Enola Gay. You see, we had a project where we had to interview a WWII vet, and even my grandpa technically wasn’t one. (He wasn’t in until after the war was over.) The teacher had told us about the guy, so I went with my grandfather to see him. When I didn’t have a doctor’s excuse, I got into a ton of trouble. I was scared, so I blamed the teacher for mentioning the guy and saying that, if you could, it would be a good thing to see.
The teacher was fired before the next school year. I’ve always felt horrible about that.
When I still had aspirations of being an actor, I took a trip cross-country that ended up taking three to four times as long as expected to return from (mainly due to vehicle troubles). I was still living with my folks at the time, and when I finally got to the door, I had 2 hours til I had to get to work. Although I don’t remember it completely clearly, I do remember sitting in a chair and just staring blankly at a wall for a while, and my parents figuring (quite rightly) that I might have been a little fatigued, they called my work and told them I wouldn’t be making it in.
18 godzillion years ago (okay, only the early 70s) I was, for a very brief time, a 411 operator in L.A. Back then you sat in a booth for hours at a time, with hard copy White and Yellow Pages phone books in front of you.
It was dreary and mind-numbing. The only upsides were the steady pay and the preponderance of female operators.
One morning, when I and one of the aforementioned females were recuperating from a night of relaxation, I called in using a fake voice and told my supervisor that ‘Alonzo is in a coma.’
The supervisor was suitably concerned and asked to be kept up to date.
The next day I showed up at work, and when asked re my coma I said; ‘Coma? I was in TaCOMA, Washington. Had family business to take care of.’
I suppose that’s going on my permanent record.
I had to call off years ago when I woke up and my water bed was pissing on the floor.
Not me, but I called my son off school once because we suddenly went to Disneyland.
The usual hangovers, extended dates from the weekend, and general laziness. I once quit a job so I could go see a band in Germany though.
Two times, neither of which had anything to do with being sick.
The first was when the idiot snowplow driver managed to forget my driveway (I live in a condominium complex) during the night when we were getting socked with about eight inches of snow. I woke up to a whiteout – and three feet of piled-up snow at the foot of my driveway.
Pissed as hell doesn’t begin to cover my feelings about the matter. I was the only driveway the genius behind the wheel managed to miss. I know because I went out and checked.
The other came about because of the two rocket scientists who tried to break into my place in the middle of the night.
I think I’ve posted about this before, but long story short, I suspect they weren’t home invasion criminals but rather a couple of friends trying to help a buddy either bug out of his lease or attempt a clean-out of an ex’s place.
They WOKE ME UP trying to open the front door (I think with a key. Not sure, but I never found any scratches on the door like there would be if they were trying to force it), while a large truck with a trailer idled loudly in the middle of the street outside. Not exactly stealth mode. Which is why I didn’t call the cops, although yeah, I probably should have. That might’ve had entertainment value all of its own.
Instead, I marched downstairs in my nightie with my trusty home invasion shotgun, rapped on the front door with the muzzle and announced loudly that unless they wanted their asses filled with double-ought, they needed to make themselves scarce.
They did, truck, trailer and all. 
I didn’t go back to sleep that night. Waited for daylight, called my boss, told him exactly what had happened, took a couple of Tylenol pms and went back to bed for 12 hours.
Called off work to drive 5 1/2 hrs (one way) to walk with a friend who was on the last leg of walking home from Arizona to Michigan.
When my mom first moved out on her own she took our Siberian Husky bitch with her. The dog was rather more attached to me than to her, but being young and broke I didn’t argue. Six months later the bitch is close to whelping and the instincts have taken over big time.
I get a panicked call at 6:00am, the bitch has barricaded herself into the dark end of a narrow closet and refuses to come out. She is growling in a dreadfully frightening manner and seems to really mean business.
So I drive 60+ minutes to drag the bitch out of the closet and into the whelping pen so that she can give birth in a safe, clean spot and without destroying Mom’s shoe collection. :smack: S’truth, she was growling like a wolf and I didn’t enjoy diving in there after her. She made a bold attempt to gnaw my left arm off as I dragged her to the door.
When I got her out of the closet it was like I’d flipped a switch. As soon as she was out and in the light she was her old self again, and clearly as confused by her behavior as my Mother was.
When I left that job years later I was given a copy of my personnel file, and I just sat down laughing hysterically when I read my boss’s note from that day.
I can only imagine what my irritated hurried-but-rambling phone message must have sounded like, as I pulled on my boots and headed out the door to my Mom’s place that morning. Strange that he never mentioned it. I suppose he’d heard the story by the coffee pot the next day and decided to just let it go.
I started to call in “stupid” once. When I got to work and told my boss he said “That’s a chronic condition…”