I talk to one of my partners
Only to the extent that I feel like hell and would rather not be talking on the phone.
All of them
I work at an academic library, and up until the beginning of this school year, I would just text my supervisor to let her know I would be staying home sick, and she’d let the administrative office know.
Then the policy changed, and we were told we had to call Admin before our shift started and then call our supervisor (texts and emails not allowed).
Then someone complained to the union that demanding we make two phone calls was too much of an ordeal.
So now Admin is looking to install a dedicated phone line. Which will not have the same privacy standards as the Admin and supervisor voice mail accounts. So let’s see how long we can go before someone complains to the union about that.
We can be out sick for three days, and then we need the doctor’s excuse.
The lectures are videotaped, but they don’t save the videos from year to year. In a technology field, in theory anyway, they would get out of date in a hurry. And no, I don’t have either powerpoints or an assistant. So if I’m not there, the lecture isn’t happening. But if that occurred too often, I’d probably find my contract not renewed for the next year.
I text my boss and my assigned teammate. If it’s flu season, I copy the admin as well. I tell them if there’s anything on my desk that needs to be handled right away. We can’t access our email or work from home (classified crap), so then I turn over and go to sleep.
After three days out, you are required to bring in a doctor’s note stating that you are not contagious and may come back to work. This is strictly enforced. I thought that it was to prove that you were sick, but HR pointed out that it’s to prove you can come back.
My company encourages you to use your sick leave when you are sick. We had a person from another office come in and state “I’m feeling so bad today, I think I’m coming down with the flu.” My boss came out and said “So you thought you’d come give it to all of us? Go. Out.” There is no virtue in working ill.
We get one day a month sick leave which is you can accumulate all you want. Vacation hours vary according to how long you’ve worked here. You can accumulate a lot, but after awhile, that turns into sick leave. Holidays are completely separate.
Hopefully that’s sick time, not total time off. If not, what sort of slave-drivers do you work for? That’s outrageous- I can’t think of a time when I haven’t had at least 14-15 days off between vacation, sick time and “personal time” (at jobs where it was for things like jury duty, dr’s appts, etc…)
I send an email to the two producers on my team, the other QA guy that I’m usually working with directly, and my manager, whom I only ever talk to if I need my time card amended, such as adding sick days. Sick days and PTO all come out of the same bucket, so they don’t really care why you’re out, and apparently aren’t too draconian with people who go over - before I started there, they had a guy who overdrew his PTO by about two weeks in his first year. He’s now lead server engineer, so I guess it didn’t hurt him too much.
Previous jobs have worked more-or-less the same. I was out for a bit more than a week, once, following emergency gall bladder surgery. I made a point of making sure I had a note from my doctor, but nobody ever asked for it.
When you say you don’t get any sick leave, does that mean that you are not allowed to be sick or that there is no set bank of sick leave a year, and you use what you need up to the point where you go on disability.
The latter has been the case everywhere I worked. We have on-line time cards that are only used to track vacation, but I wouldn’t even know where to enter sick leave.
When I worked at Bell Labs our center had a no sick days recognition ceremony - until they figured out that encouraging people to come in sick was not really a good idea.
You call a machine, leave your name, that’s it. No policy about doctor’s notes, but if you’re out more than two weeks you need to talk to HR. There’s talk of letting you do it online soon.
Not hard at all. I’m a government employee - I work for a public library in Adult Services. When sick (which for me is rare) I just call our departments’ sick line and leave a message before my shift or wait until someone is there to answer the phone in the morning. In my department staff arrives an hour before we open. I have a month and half of sick time saved up, so there’s no problem if and when I need some time off. I believe a doctor’s note is needed after 3 days missed.
This morning, after an almost sleepless night due to RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) I called in around 6a.m. saying that I wouldn’t be in, but by 9a.m. I had managed to get a couple more hours of sleep, and so I called again saying that I would be in at 11a.m… And now here I am, “doping,” at work! Hi everyone! 
By the way, RLS is so completely annoying. If you have ever experienced it, you certainly know what I mean.
- I send one email addressed to a few people and tell them I’m not coming in.
- Difficult in the sense that the Outlook Web App I have to use is not my favorite.
- I think three days.
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A person - usually, my boss, or my supervisor.
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No - just tell the person that you’re sick.
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Three in a row, but the “doctor’s excuse” you need after that is something that shows that you’re healthy enough to go back to work, as opposed to something that “proves” that you were sick for four or more days.
It may be easier for me to call in sick as I have over a year of sick leave banked. (Seriously - and there’s incentive to do it; if you reach retirement age before leaving, any sick leave not used counts as time worked towards calculating your pension payments. For me, that would be about an extra $1000/year. Originally, sick leave couldn’t count as time worked, but it got to the point where too many people were calling in sick too much right before they retired.)
As a management consultant, no one knows where the hell I am half the time anyway. “Are you coming to the office” is a far more common question than “where the hell were you?”
Basically I’m used to being able to work from home, travel when and where I want, basically do whatever the fuck I feel like. Basically, if I’m dialing in for a call with a client in Chicago, I don’t need to be in the office to do that. And if I don’t need to be in the office, there’s no reason I have to be at home instead of, I don’t know, my families house in the Hamptons.
The flip side of that is that I need to be wherever I need to be to make sure the project is getting done. Ergo. posting from an Acela train to Boston (to find my wooden leg).
But generally, yeah. If I need actual time off, it’s relatively easy.
I text my manager. I’ve got 200 or so sick hours. I’ll usually work from home if it’s just a common cold. In the past, it was 5 days before wanting the doctor’s note. We haven’t been briefed on the current policy since 2011, so I’m not exactly sure what it is .
I’m curious and maybe some of you know.
Actors. Lets say someone is a lead in a play or musical and gets sick and cannot perform. Obviously “the show must go on” so how do they do that? Is there a substitute actor available for all roles?
Major roles will have an understudy. It’s expected that experienced actors can step into other roles when needed.
Never seen 42nd Street, have you?
- I email my boss to let her know I’ll be out sick, and cc a handful of co-workers.
- Takes a few minutes more than it used to, because I’ve got to log into my agency’s Virtual Desktop thingy to access my work email nowadays.
- Three days.
ETA: Lowdown - we’ve got Outlook Web Application too, and gawd, does it suck. We switched to it nearly a year ago, and pretty much everybody I know is still unhappy with it.
THIS, has to be my favorite! What an envious position to be at!
I phone our operations people and tell them I won’t be in to work. They arrange someone to cover for me. As for a doctor’s certificate, it’s complicated. My contract says I get 21 sick days a year that carry over to subsequent years and I also get 6 “URTI” days that I can take if I have an upper respiratory tract infection, AKA a cold. The URTIs don’t accrues and don’t require a certificate. Two single sick days per year can be taken with no certificate, otherwise a cert is required, however a statutory deceleration that you were unwell is sufficient. I took 6 weeks off early this year with a broken collar bone and still have well over 100 sick days owing. Despite it being needlessly complicated, it is nice knowing that I am covered for significant time off work I’d I ever need it.
I send a text to boss and someone in my office just so they don’t worry when I don’t show up. It is very easy. I think three days needs a doctor note but it is not a big deal.