This makes me batty: one of my co-workers, who was diagnosed yesterday with strep throat, is back at work today. It’s not really her fault; she feels like crap and looks like crap, but says her team leader basically told her that she’d better be here, or else.
This pisses me off: on top of being rather cruel and pointless to the sick person, I have to share the hallways, the bathrooms, and the lunchroom with this highly contagious sick person (her office is about 15 feet down the hall from mine). I used to get strep at least once a year, and was repeatedly told to stay home for at least a couple of days, because it takes that long for the drugs to work enough that you’re not contagious anymore.
I can’t imagine that my poor colleague will be all that productive today, given her condition, and it pisses me off that her boss has apparently decided that it’s worth risking the health of the rest of the office, many of whom have spouses and small children at home, to drag out of her whatever little work she will be able to get done today. WTF???
Amen to that! The sandwich shop across the street from my office is notorious for expecting workers to come in even though they’re hacking up a lung.
So there they are, coughing, hacking, and sniffling all over MY LUNCH! Well, OK, I rarely eat there, but my coworker once came down with a hideous bug that she swears is the result of one of those sandwiches. She even called them to complain to the manager, and was told that it had been a “management determination” (or some such gobbledygook) that the employee in question was not sick enough to stay home.
must suck to have to work for a living and actually be at work to get paid for it! glad i got outta that rat-race!
heres a plan: when one of your cow-orkers are sick, you stay home, burning a sick day, so you don’t have to be around them! encourage them to do the same, and everything will work out in the end! :rolleyes:
I just don’t get how they think dragging a sick person in to work will be a good idea in the end, even leaving aside the humanitarian concerns; if she gets someone else sick (or several others), the office will lose way more employee work hours overall than they would if they just let her stay home an extra day or two.
The trouble with telling HR is that our one HR person is nice, but rather clueless, and is frequently forced to suck up to management, who will tend to back the team leaders in these situations unless they think it’s a potential ADA issue or something. Strep sure does suck, but I think one would be hard-pressed to define it as a disability.
We told folks in the Peds clinic that strep wouldn’t be contagious after 24 hours on the antibiotics. (If I recall correctly, that is; it was a while back.)
This is ridiculous. When I worked at the supermarket, sick employees were ALWAYS coming in. It was, I think, half due to not wanting to lose pay (hey, market wages are low) and half due to a severe fear of getting scolded. I once called out sick on Easter Sunday and got my ass yelled off. They wouldn’t hear that my options were to either hug the toilet at home or hug the one at work…I was REALLY ill.
It does sicken (pardon the pun) me that employers aren’t more tolerant of illness, instead treating their employees like cogs that can (or should) be replaced when one goes bad.
Well, your rant should have been “Don’t DEMAND that sick workers come in!” because that’s sort of a separate issue.
I confess I went to work last week with the flu. I tried to stay away from everyone. But this is my boss’ one flaw: she gets really freaked out when people are out, whatever the reason. And I’d already had an unexpected day out, ruining an important meeting, the week before. And I had a vacation day that same week. I just couldn’t get over how hacked off she’d be at me. So I went and figured that if I got sicker, I’d go home (say, before I puked on anyone) but would still get brownie points for being there a half day and hero points for coming in sick (turns out I got better by the hour and stayed all day).
I know this is utterly warped and fucked and wrong and puts my coworkers at risk. But every one of them knows exactly how my boss is. We take turns trying to convince each other to go home when we’re scraping ourselves through the office.
I got fired from a temp job once for staying home sick. It’s one of those awful catch-22’s: you’re sick so you can’t come to work (in my case, that particular time I was vomiting off & on for several hours), but if you don’t come to work you lose your job. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
That’s her problem, not yours. If your company allows you to take sick days, by God, TAKE THEM!
It irks me when sick people come in and you point out the fact that they’re going to get everyone else sick and they say, “I know, I know…” If you know, stay home!
And here I work at a hospital, where you can be written up if you have more than 3 “occurrences” of time off sick. Just think. You work around sick people, or people with compromised immune systems, or people who have just had surgery, and you are expected to come in and either infect them or make them sicker! So we are here to make sick people well, but we are supposed to come in when we are sick? Makes no sense, and fortunately the hospital is looking into revising this dumbass policy.
