Can I just add here that I can’t stand the “I plan on coming in to work the first day I am allowed!” woman, who invariably morphs into the “I can’t believe I’m not allowed to telecommute! This is bullshit!” woman. Of course, #2 also bristles at the notion that ANYBODY else might want to telecommute, too.
When this happens, think of her husband and what he must be going through.
Also, used handbags…
I’d like to add the “I’m coming back to work full-time” morphing into “part-time” into “quitting” folks, too.
I understand that once you have that baby you are going to realize how cute it is. Perhaps you and your extended support group could decide a wee bit sooner that you are going to leave us high and dry. Especially when the “part-time” turns out to usually be 8 hours a week, sometime during the week, mostly when no one else is here. And then the quitting turns out to be “I’m not coming back tomorrow.”
Just wanted to say that not everyone experiences ‘morning sickness’ the same. Some women end up with Hyperemesis Gravidarum (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/31360.php) and a small percentage of those end up being hospitalized. You don’t just vomit once, clean yourself up and go back to your desk. Once you start vomiting, you can’t stop. You can’t eat or even drink fluids. You can wake up in the middle of the night to vomit. Your sense of smell is magnified and pretty much all smells are nauseating. There’s a gradient to this so it’s hard to diagnose but it can be serious. I had to take a phenergan suppository several times a day to prevent having to go to the hospital. It was lots of fun shoving that thing up my ass in the stall at work. However, even with the phenergan, I could barely eat and vomited occasionally. I ended up losing about 7 lbs the first three months. Then I started to acquire a phenergan tolerance so they reluctantly gave me a dopamine antagonist for a couple of weeks. Luckily, the sickness almost instantaneously disappeared.
Also, low blood pressure and fatigue can also be pretty severe in the first trimester.
Don’t know the situation but this person may have symptoms much worse than yours. If so, the only legitimate pit would be not taking proper leave as you mentioned belatedly in your subsequent post. However, be aware that the leave will have to be spontaneous because symptoms vary dramatically even within the same day.
Yeah. She sounds like a twit, but for a lot of women morning sickness doesn’t end at week twelve, and for some it can be debilitating. I got to stop taking anti-nausea meds the day I delivered, with both my pregnancies, and without them I’d have gotten dehydrated and possibly starved to death.
Fun fact: Charlotte Bronte died of morning sickness.
Betcha dollars to doughnuts that 90% of those KNOW they’re going to quit when they’re still saying “full time”. Because declaring that you intend to resign is very, very likely to get you “resigned” at that very instant.
A corporation won’t ever take an employee’s best interest into consideration when making a decision, there’s no fucking reason at all an employee should take the corporation’s best interest into consideration either.
Ludy, what kind of work are we talking here?
/me raises hand
Morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening sickness, overnight sickness.
It got so bad one morning I took my breakfast plate from my mom, walked into the bathroom and flushed the contents. I told my mom I was tired of being the middleman. I was spending break and lunch lying on the nice cold cement floor of my ‘vault’ [expensive metal storage for the machine shop] because the air conditioner couldn’t get my office cold enough, because I lost the ability to adjust my temperature worth a damn, so I was running a low grade fever for 3 months, june, july and august that my OB could do nothing about except tell me to stay in the coolest room I could get, and drink lots of ice water. I turned the heater off on my waterbed. It was like a 3 month hot flash.
My body really really really did not handle pregnancy well. I do the gestational diabetes thing, the blood pressure thing and the kidney shutdown thing.
And it’s common for a lot of other reasons, too. Hangovers are the most common excuse for absenteeism. You gonna stop drinking - not that I’m suggesting you’re a slacker.
Like I said already, some people will use any excuse to slack off.
Parenting isn’t a catch-all pathology.
IME, patients with Hyperemesis Gravidarum look sick as hell most of the time, and don’t function much at all at work, in the home, or anywhere else, for that matter. So while it’s possible the OP’s co-worker is disguising the symptoms well, it’s more likely that said co-worker doesn’t have HG.
However, a good rule of thumb is never to compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.
That doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll be replaced though. One of my coworkers just got off five months of bedrest (definitely required - not a whiner) and the rest of the department had to pick up her work. No money for a fill in.
Honestly, this is a management issue. Talk to your boss. “Coworker’s pregnancy seems to really have impacted her ability to be here. I suspect she thought once she got over the morning sickness hump, she’d be good, but I suspect that if she gets any respite, it will be a few weeks and then the horrible third trimester will start. I think we need to bring in a temp to start picking up some of her workload.”
Bonus points if this speech is given to a woman who gave birth.
However, it might not do any good. Its hard to fire someone for being pregnant - hard to justify expense dollars to bring in help.
Oh, God. I worked with two women that didn’t have kids but had significant slack issues - one was late and visibly hung over (when she showed up) three to five days a week.
The other had “relationship issues” - between boyfriend, new boyfriend, old boyfriend, guy she just met, new new boyfriend, old new boyfriend and all the drama (that she nursed) that girl was gone half the week. Honestly, I did feel for her, she had the WORST taste in men and several of her “gones” involved court dates and hospital trips. But like me trying to keep my sick kids from becoming someone else’s responsibility - I can only take so much responsibility for “I date jackasses.”
Both these women were at the same place. No one in the entire place had kids (this was before my husband and I even dated, much less were thinking about our children). A cardboard cutout of Darth Vader would have been more effective at their jobs.
And before I sound like an sexist “only women are slackers” - I’ve worked with men who have found many excuses to be absent from their desk. Your WoW raid is not an excuse to call in sick (and if you are going to do that, don’t post about it on Facebook where you’ve friended your coworkers.)
Isn’t there a thread going at the moment about no-shows after the Superbowl?
Heeheehee… I recently caught a male co-worker doing something like this. Every two or three months he will call in to work saying he has a bad fever and will stay home to rest and go to a doctor’s appointment.
Well, he and his wife just started trying to have a baby, and he was asking me about the insurance situation for co-pays etc. He said, “I never knew all of this stuff, in five years I’ve never been to the doctor.”
Orly? :smack:
Yep - I puked everywhere, everyday, anytime of day for the full pregnancy. ‘Throwing up in the bathroom.’ was not an option. I threw up in parking lots. I threw up in the office garbage can. I threw up on my husband.
Believe me, no one minded when I didn’t come into work, 'cus I was revolting.
That being said, I did do a lot of work from home (I had that type of job). My assistant had to attend a couple of meetings in my place, but for the most part I just handled stuff from a distance.
Now, if your coworker is a whiny bitch, that’s fine, and totally pit-worthy. In my experience that doesn’t have much to do with being pregnant though.
I would say about 90 percent desk work, 5 percent medium duty work and 5 percent heavy.
I will also note that when that 5 percent heavy duty comes up, she is generally nowhere to be found.
Some of her work is possible to do from home, but she has never offered.
In the hierarchy here she is basically at the bottom of our department, I am second in command. The head is currently halfway across the country until next Monday but answering e-mails. After the coworker did not show today and didn’t call, I e-mailed my boss to let her know the situation. Basically nothing can be done until the boss comes back and gets a chance to talk to the big boss.
I seriously doubt it is Hyperemesis Gravidarum since this past Monday she worked just fine and had no complaints. There have been other days when she has been fine for most of the day, but just had to leave about 2 hours early.
Normally it would worry me that she hasn’t contact us, but her close sibling also works for this small company and he would know if anything was serious.
If he is still your husband…thats a keeper, or someone who has worked in acute care medicine.
<mini hijack>
When I started as an EMT I was given the “unofficial list of shit that once you had completed you are a real EMT”. Being splattered with large quantities of vomit was i think #2 on the list.
That’s what happens when you let women enter the workforce.
pee, shit, vomit … the grossness hat trick.
mrAru spent 2 months doing wound management on me post op back in 95.