I wish.
“No matter how gorgeous she is someone, somewhere, is sick of putting up with her shit.”
You’d get sick of it really fast. 
I used to be, stay home with a fever or a really sore throat - anything else, and I show up for work. My company used to give out plaques for saving up sick days (starting at the equivalent of six months’ worth), but haven’t done this in decades; most likely, a cost issue, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody claimed they were discriminating against women who got pregnant.
More recently, anything borderline (e.g. severe runny nose, or nothing contagious but severe pains), and I’ll stay home. I was “asked” to go home once, when I had a kidney stone that only really hurt when I sneezed.
Well, they lose money when you take off time to have fun. Great place to work!
Kayaker doesn’t strike me as the type who would wake up in the morning and call his crew to tell them to stay home because he felt like…well…kayaking instead.
When I plan ahead to take a day off we structure the schedule so that everyone works a full shift except for me. And yes, I’m often on the water when I take off.
I don’t call in sick anymore for a couple of reasons.
- My company doesn’t pay sick pay… they converted all of our vacation and some of our sick days into ‘personal days’. So sick or vacation comes out of the same pool.,
- Fairly liberal work from home policy. So if I’m feeling sluggish, or have a headache, etc., I work from home. If I’m really sick then I “work from home.” with the full meaning of the quotes. Imagine me making double quote signs with my fingers when I say the second “work from home.”
You know, in this day and age, I’m surprised that employers still push the whole guilt thing. It’s been proven several times over that it behooves the employer if they encourage their employees to stay home.
As for me? Shoot, I’ll stay home over a hangnail! Those things hurt!
That’s one of the funny things about being sick - for me, I’m usually feeling the worst in the morning - if I stay home and sleep the morning away, I’m often feeling good enough to work by the afternoon. You might as well stay home the whole day after that, though - it’s only taken me about 45 years to learn this, but if you take it easy when you’re sick, you heal up faster.
I used to go to work/class for anything short of death. And even then, I’d have to be so dead the bocor couldn’t get the zombie drugs to work. I think it came from the kind of eye-rolling reaction I got when I was a kid – “Yeah, sure, you’re sick, whatever. Just go back to bed and don’t bother me.” When I got out on my own, I was determined to Be An Adult and not lie in bed all day being a wilting flower just because of a few sniffles.
The rule these days is that I’ll get dressed and go out if whatever I have isn’t dangerous to others and I can reliably medicate it away for 6-8 hours, or at least drown myself in NyQuil to the point where it doesn’t bother me too much. Sniffles, coughing, sore throats, and minor but inconvenient injuries I can drug into submission; puking, diarrhea, fevers over 101, and migraines, I usually can’t. Congestion is kind of a grey area. My sinuses like to collect things, you see, so the line between ‘head cold’ and ‘head full of cement which will keep me up with headaches and weird breathing problems for the next three weeks’ is a fine one. I do try to note when I’m so stuffed up my ears are also packed and I don’t walk straight, however. 
In the past few years, I have also learned that when more than one coworker comes up to you, looks at you with big round saucer eyes, and asks, “Oh my god – do you want to go home?”, unless it’s a matter of life, death, or losing your job on the spot, the answer is yes. By the time I get sick enough that I should stay home because of a collection of symptoms rather than a specific inconvenient one, I’m too sick to really think about it. Other people notice the difference better than I do.
You should do an “ask the bouncer” thread.
My general rule is: if I’m running a fever, I stay home. I figure that’s a pretty good sign that I’m either a) really sick, b) contagious, or c) both. I’m fortunate enough to not have any ‘non-sickness-related’ ailments (e.g. migraines, musculoskeletal issues) that are likely to present themselves without an accompanying fever, so it’s pretty easy for me to make a determination.
Depends on the nature of the illness. If it is something that is contagious I try not to take it in and spread it around (although I’ve been told that by the time I know I’m contagious it is too late.) I wish more people would do that.
But if it is something like a recovery from an operation, I always have to be told by my physician that I am not allowed to work, because I always figure I feel just as bad at home as I do at work, and I might as well have something to distract me.
So I stay home only for as long as I am ordered to. My doc and I have spoken frankly about this and he says he’ll let me go in just as soon as it is safe, and I promise I will obey all the rules that he lays down.
I work with immunocompromised children so if I was infectious in any way, I’d stay home. Unfortunately (for me) that only ever seems to happen on my days off, so I haven’t had a sick day for six years or so.
I’m a high school teacher. I stay home when I’m so sick that organizing a plan for the substitute and emailing it to my department head is more appealing than dragging my sorry butt to school and dealing with it. This means, unfortunately, less often than I know I should.
One of my goals for this summer vacation is to build up a supply of worksheets so that I can just email “On the file box on my desk, there’s a folder marked ‘Substitute’, grab the worksheet marked XYZ and photocopy enough for all the students, good luck, I’m crawling back to bed now.”
I’ll stay home if I’m feverish, vomiting, or generally feeling so crappy that I can’t think straight. I wouldn’t want to screw anything up at work and have someone not catch it. (That, and I work in close quarters with lots of people, and lots of clients, many of whom have small children.) I’ve gone to work, though, with bronchitis, way too soon post-surgically, etc.
Don’t pass on your germs to your co-workers. A sneeze envelopes them in a cloud of germs (and this is not to mention anything you touch). I always told college students in my class to stay home is they are contagious, as I wanted to last without days off and put off sickness until my break.