One, if I have to “call in,” it means that I’m scheduled to teach classes that day and I’ll be having to rearrange my syllabus schedule in a way that doesn’t punish the students by giving them more work but also lets me get through the material in an appropriate way. If I’m not teaching that day, I just add more hours to the other days I’m on campus, so there’s no “calling in” required.
Two, it means that some students might not get the email through the school system, the email through the course website, and my personal email to their school email addresses that class is canceled that day and therefore some students will show up to the class and waste time (and sometimes money) getting to the campus.
Three, I was raised with a strict work ethic (my SO calls it “Calvinism” although I’m not sure that fits) that says that unless you are actively projectile vomiting blood or in a coma, you are not sick.
This makes me feel better - I went back to sleep after I started the thread and I don’t feel so guilty anymore. I rarely take sick days - I took a half day over the last year. And it’s slow at work with the Xmas season.
Tomorrow I gotta ask the boss what he thought of my voicemail - if he didn’t know me so well he’d think I was hungover.
I don’t feel guilty at all. Also, I don’t do it unless I’m actually sick. I work at a place that doesn’t have official sick and vacation days, just ‘time off with pay.’ I get a bundle of days every year that’s my personal time–vacation, sick, doctor appointments, whatever. So, if I call in sick, it’s because I’m sick.
I work in a very small team, so I’ll consider the staffing level before I decide not to come in. If I know we’re already down two people because of scheduled absences, I’ll make the effort of coming in. But then I’ll mostly stay at my desk to avoid exhausting myself.
Are you talking about paid sick days? Days you’ve earned?
Pre-heart attack I didn’t take vacation, and I didn’t take sick days. I had 6 weeks vacation that I either lost every year, or I sold back to the company for 30 cents on the dollar. My wife said that when they were wheeling me in for my heart cath, I kept saying, “Call my boss. Call my boss.”
Post-heart attack: I take every vacation day and sick day I accrue. If it’s touted as a benefit for working at the company, I take it.
I don’t mind taking a sick day if I’m sick, but I don’t take them just because they’re there. As a federal employee, my sick leave hours accumulate over the years, 104 hours per year. After 20 years of service, assuming you take only two sick days per year, you could theoretically accumulate 11 months of sick leave. This could be handy in the case of catastrophic illness (cancer, heart disease, etc.), which is more likely to strike later in life and could require a large amount of time off.
Moreover, at the end of your federal career, any unused sick leave is added to your actual service years for the purpose of calculating pension benefits.
I don’t feel guilty, but as I’m still a grad student, skipping things because I’m sick is a huge hassle because then there’s a pile of stuff to make up and you never catch up again. It started getting this way in high school.
My parents were always pretty relaxed about sick days from school. If I told them I didn’t feel well, they let me stay home. But because making up missed work was such a hassle and I hated that they felt they had to take time off to stay with me (I guess they figured that if I was sick enough to be complaining I was too sick to be left alone), I never did it more than a couple times.
Due to fairly extreme insomnia I take 5 or 6 half days off per year. I’ve found that when I haven’t been able to sleep at night if I take that morning and give myself the opportunity to get 2-3 hours sleep my body will correct the problem the next night and I will end up on a proper sleep cycle again. If I push myself to go into work and force myself to stay awake all day that night my body gets all wound up and won’t let me sleep again despite my exhaustion. After a couple of nights like that I’m constantly dry heaving and sobbing uncontrollably because my body can’t function and my husband has to stop me from calling my office and quitting so I can just stay home and sleep forever. Life is better for everyone when I take those mornings to get a couple of hours of sleep instead of forcing myself through work. My employer understands that and has never said a word about my needing the occasional morning off.
I also called in sick today! I injured my knee yesterday and can barely walk, plus my neck and shoulder are killing me. %&#@ cold Florida weather.
I don’t feel guilty, though, because I teach online classes for a living and have been online most of the day grading and answering emails–just from the comfort of my couch. I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate sitting in my office chair all day.
I don’t feel guilty about it, but it’s very difficult for me to do. I manage our rental properties, and my tenants know that if my car’s in the driveway, I’m home. If I’m home (according to their reasoning), I am available. If I’m available, sick days are tough.
The last time I was really sick (vomiting, diarrhea, low-grade fever; had to use all my energy just to get from my bed to the bathroom, etc.), I actually asked my 10YO to stay home from school, just so she could fetch me juice, tea and water, and answer the door so she could tell tenants I was sick and couldn’t help them, please come back tomorrow.
I posted notices in public hallways to notify my tenants that I operate on “Business Hours”, Monday through Friday, 9AM to 5PM, and if your problem is not an emergency, please don’t bother me outside of business hours. Problem is, different people have different definitions of “emergency”. If my notices worked, I’d seriously consider printing one up that says “I’m sick today; please do not bother me unless it is an absolute emergency”.
I am the sysadmin for an on-demand system. Downtime stops income. I seem to have managed to negotiate a brilliant form of true flexitime. I turn up simply as and when I feel like it. Ok, I usually work Monday to Friday and appear during the day at some point, but everyone is quite used to see me arrive around lunch or even not at all. I get a lot of work done at home, especially late at night when the service level agreement says I can take down the system. Hell, it is around 1am right now and I am running some pretty IO intensive scripts.
The down side of this is that I recently had back surgery (too many years of sitting badly in front of computers) and three days after it, on my first day home, I was already answering work calls and logging in to fix some issues.
I, too, can work from home, so if I have my laptop, I’ll stay home for a hang nail. If I end up sleeping all day, I take the sick day; if I work, I take a work-from-home-day.
I currently have nearly three weeks of sick time accrued.
Yeah I feel guilty calling in sick because I know someone will have been called in from standby to cover for me. Also because my employer require a medical certificate for any sick day and I never bother getting one so I have a nagging worry that they’ll chase me up for it (they never do.) As a pilot I have an obligation not to work in an unfit state so I always call in if I need to regardless of any guilt trip I send myself on.
I’m sick right now and haven’t called in because it would be a headache to get someone to cover for me. So yeah, I feel guilty either way. I just pray that I don’t make anyone else sick, so I’m staying far away from everyone.
No, I don’t feel guilty. There’s no-one to cover for me, so if I call in sick it means there’s more work waiting for me when I get back.
I feel guilty not taking sick days, because I really do have to be incapacitated before I’ll consider staying home. I usually just hide in my office and drive hand-sanitizer company shares up every time someone brings me something that I can’t resolve without opening my door.
This pretty much a 180 from when I was in my twenties and took “sick days” whenever I stayed up too late to be arsed to drag my sorry ass in. One time my boss flat-out told me that I had to come in, because my equally-slacker partner had called in sick before me, and closed his conversation with “…and you’d better really be sick.” I took a couple of tabs of LSD to simulate illness, hustled my butt out the door, and earned an “Employee of the Month” bonus for pulling it together when I was so obviously suffering. Didn’t feel guilty at all.
Forty-year-old me looks down his nose at twenty-year-old me a bit, but doubts that he’d be able to talk any sense into that self-centered little prick if he had the opportunity.
I used to work for IBM. They had a very strict policy and if you missed a certain percentage you were put on a warning.
One girl who had been out a bit came in for a night shift. She was really really sick and said she only came in as she didn’t want a warning. I was the shift supervision and asked the manager to let her go home. He was having none of it and basically said “fuck her”. She got worse throughout the night and may have been eventually sent home after collapsing (this is 15years ago now and I may be mixing it up with another incident). She did however wipe out the shift over the next few days. We were down to less that a skeleton crew and missed important targets because of it.
My current employer has a very lenient system and in my 10 years here I’ve never seen anyone questioned about absence. People know that they can take it if needed but they don’t seem to take the piss at all. If someone is obviously struggling, managers have taken it upon themselves to send people home rather than waiting to be asked. There is less absenteeism here than in IBM.
I feel terribly guilty about calling in sick (in fact, I feel guilty for being sick even if I don’t have to work). However, I will take an occasional mental health day. My co-workers average about one day out per pay period.