Oh, oh, oh! I have a NEW one I just used this morning!
Boss: “Why are you late?”
Me: “I got stuck behind a nuclear waste convoy.”
Better yet - it was absolutely true.
In my previous job, two girls called in on a Monday because they had gone to Mexico for the weekend to get drunk and then couldn’t get a ride back.
Another pair (boyfriend and girlfriend living together) called in because their shower wasn’t working. What the hell? Just wash in the sink, put on some extra deodorant, and come in to work!
My own story: I went home during a long lunch one day, set my alarm, and laid down for a nap. The power went out, so my alarm never rang. I must have been really tired, because I slept for about two and a half hours. When I woke up, I did a double-take at the time on my watch. The weirdest thing was, nobody from work called me to see why I hadn’t shown up for two hours after lunch!
Once I was about two hours late coming back from lunch. Seattle has free bus service in the downtown area. I accidentally hopped on an Express. They make very few stops, and I couldn’t get off until the bus was in West Seattle, where I had to wait for another bus to get back downtown.
I was forever reading the bus signs wrong and getting on an express. A couple times my husband had to drive to Tukwila to get me.
A lady couldn’t work starting on a Monday because her dog died on a Friday. She couldn’t work Monday through Friday and had to see a psychiatrist a couple times that week. The lady could show up at work and talk with people in the area she didn’t work and she wasn’t depressed over there.
Underlining mine.
Does it make you feel any better that it’s actually April already? 
-
‘I fell in the gap between the train and the platform.’
-
‘My Grandad has lost his artificial leg.’
-
‘We are locked in the flat.’
All from me, and all genuine.
-
I did make it to work, though late, with scratched trousers, a bit of shock and a leg that looked like it had been in a nuclear silo (two years later I was diagnosed with narcolepsy - they fired me long before that).
-
He really did lose his prosthetic leg. I was his carer. At this distance, to be honest, I can’t remember where the leg turned up. Again, I was just late, rather than not there.
-
When leaving the house, do NOT lock the door. It locks automatically. If you lock the door from the outside, those inside can’t get out. There is no other exit. My flatmate/ex-GF (a high-powered lawyer) and I spent half an hour banging on the windows before we managed to throw a set of keys to someone and have him let us out. He was probably late for work too. This happened twice.
I hope she shared the rest of the story with you! Poor kid, though.
The most interesting I’ve ever had called in to me was that - quite literally - the voices in the TV told him not to leave the house.
The most pathetic was that her car had broken down, so she couldn’t get in. No bus route suggestions made any difference to this woman who lived a fifteen-minute walk from work.
He/she said ‘December shutdown,’ so maybe they work by the calendar year rather than the tax year, like my GF’s workplace does.
It isn’t often that I think I can ‘win’ a thread, but I think I had the best excuse and it was real, and you have to put yourself in my shoes.
WARNING DISTURBING CONTENT!
So my wife (then girlfriend) and I lived in Worcester Massachusetts in a big victorian house on the ground floor. The upper floor was rented by a very nice middle aged woman who just lived for her dog, a nice looking cocker spaniel type. She didn’t seem to have many friends, but she doted on her dog. She was also not a terribly responsible pet owner. She would let her dog off leash to wander around the front of the yard to pee, or she used the long flexi-lead.
I worked about twenty minutes away and my wife and I shared one car, which we parked in the driveway. On a key day for work when I just had to be there I was getting ready and I heard a terrible thud and my neighbor screaming. I come running downstairs to find that the garbage truck had run over her dog right where the driveway turned into the street. The dog was killed instantly and was almost cut in half with the body across the driveway.
Our neighbor was just bereft and the scene was unbearably gruesome. The problem of course was that there was no way I could back out and go to work without running right back over the fresh dog remains. So my choice was to either tell my neighbor, “I am terribly sorry, but do you mind if I shovel the dog remains up so I can go to work?”. Or I could wait until she, or someone decided it was time to do something with the dog. Given the way work was this was a terrible terrible day to call in sick when my shift was just about due to start.
I did the only thing I could which was to almost get fired and try to explain to my boss why he would just have to wait until I could get to work given the circumstances. In hindsight that was not the most accomodating place to work, but I really needed the job.
But regardless of when a year starts and finishes, this month is always this month… 
I meant that by saying “And it’s only March” in April didn’t sound quite right. I suppose the timestamp on the post could be wrong…
But his is what he/she said
He/she didn’t say this month.
When I worked for the phone company I was late coming back from lunch because I got lost in the building!
This was when it was downtown. There was an old, old building, a somewhat newer addition, and then a very new building, all kind of wrapped around another building housing a different company entirely. The floors didn’t match, so what was (for instance) the 8th floor in the old, old building, was the 7th floor, or maybe it was the 9th floor, in the newest building, where I worked. I wandered around for the longest time. There were some weird things in that old building, let me tell you.
My supervisor pointed out that, even lost as I was, there were phones everywhere.
Last week my sister was on her way to the airport to fly out of state for a job interview. She called me in a panic and asked me to contact her interviewer in order to reschedule the appointment and, if possible, the flight. It seems that there was a herd of cattle blocking the highway and traffic was at a standstill. Considering that she lives in College Station, Texas, such things are actually not that unusual. But the folks she was interviewing with must’ve thought it was a scream.
Where I work you get 19 PTO days a year, whether you’re sick or on vacation that’s what you get.
I thought this was a really good idea until this year. I scheduled, about three months in advance, 6 days in a row off (we’re actually required to schedule at least 5 in a row once a year.) My husband and I live about a 13 hour drive from our families, and we planned a packed coming-home itinerary for early January since we were unable to come home for Christmas.
About two days before my scheduled vacation, I am slammed with one of the most horrible illnesses I’ve ever had. I end up in the ER, and spend the entire alottment of my ‘‘vacation’’ at home, light years from my family, barely able to crawl out of bed. I am a very sickly person, and I can’t remember ever being so ill, with the possible exception of the esophogael hernia I had when I was 14.
Bye bye, vacation! 8 days PTO up in smoke. It is now highly unlikely I’ll see my family at all this year.
The next two months were filled with follow-up doctor’s appointments to try to figure out what the hell is wrong with me. I’ve also had three days off for grad school interviews and info sessions. I scheduled the doctor’s appointments on those same days at times I was able, and I’ve had days with two appointments instead of one to try to minimize my time out.
It is April and I have 4.5 days of PTO left for the year. I am dire need of another doctor’s appointment and the dentist, and it wouldn’t kill me to take my cat to the vet either. If I weren’t leaving to start grad school in July, I’d be completely screwed.
I have had issues with attendance all of my life, and I’ve been working very hard over the last couple of years to improve in this area. It’s not that I deliberately call out when I’m not sick, it’s just that my body reacts to stress with physical symptoms. An upset stomach, hot flashes and nausea could just as easily be anxiety about work performance than the flu, and it’s very hard for me to judge which is when. On top of that, I’m very prone to illness, but I get the sort of illnesses that take doctors a long time to figure out. I’ve had everything from a severe allergic reaction to the sun to, as I mentioned before, a hernia at 14. I missed weeks of class when I was a little kid, both for physical illnesses (strep throat 7 times in two years!) and constant family drama, so those habits are hard to break. I never paid any real consequences because I did well in school, so calling in sick became an ingrained coping mechanism.
But even when I’m calling out for what may seem like farfetched reasons, I’m not dumb enough to tell my boss anything other than, ‘‘I’m sick.’’ It’s really none of their business and the only thing I really owe them is a doctor’s note, but they rarely ask for one. I think it’s hysterical that if you actually have a colossally stupid reason for calling out, you would provide that collossally stupid reason as an excuse.
I’m really proud of my attendance this year. If it weren’t for the disastrous events in January I would have a total of 2 sick days, and 3 grad school-related days. I’m in awe of people who just always show up for stuff, but for me it’s a constant battle, one I am happy to say I’m finally winning.
olivesmarch4th story is reason why I think that PTO is just not that great of a deal. Everyone always likes the idea, until they get sick, and realize that now all of a sudden their vacation time is gone. I think it’s a sucky decision to have to make; if you’re sick, you’re sick, and shouldn’t be at work. You need vacation time every year to keep both mentally and physically healthy. The two are separate things and both should be available to employees.
And, for the record, I have no dog in this race. I’m self-employed and get as many sick and vacation days as I can afford. 
What’s been happening with the PTO, too, is that two weeks of vacation & two weeks of sick time are now combined in this brand-new benefit: three weeks of PTO.
Before if I had sick time that exceeded my allowance, I had to take vacation time anyway - that’s not really a change - to have sick time cut into vacation time. What a lot of companies have done now, though, is cut that total time down and call it a “benefit”.
…well - it’s a benefit to them, anyway…
I meant April. I was doing reporting all morning for last month and had typed March a billion times. Sorry!
And before anyone decides to nitpick that - billion is hyperbole. I didn’t literally type March a billion times.
I do have to admit that I have some benefits in this respect, in that I work at a medical center. We are encouraged to have our doctors be at our workplace, especially via one option of health insurance package as choosing our workplace as your primary healthcare center, and this pays more per visit than the others. Thus you can take a lunchtime/end of the day/start of the day doctor’s appointment. (This was a huge help when I had physical therapy 3x/wk after I broke my wrist. I was only out of work two days for that injury.) We also don’t have these week-long forced shutdowns around Christmas/spring break, as others have complained, and fewer forced “holidays” because it’s a medical center.
The hospital I worked at prior to this would split vacation and sick days, and gave us about the same amount for each that I currently get for all of my PTO. The problem was that I was so overworked that I pretty much never got the chance to use any vacation days, and regularly lost days off by hitting the cap; this was true of a lot of people there. When I was laid off (budget cuts), they paid me out about two months of unused days. I’m a whole lot happier here, so I don’t care about that apparent “loss” of a benefit.
I knew that, Glory- it was gentle fun. But I have no clue what scifisam2009 was on about…
Had an employee call in sick one day and tell us she had just had anal sex for the first time the night before and her ass was still bleeding. For what it’s worth, we believed her because we didn’t think anyone would make up an excuse like that.
I’m lucky in that we have a generous number of sick and personal days. Most people don’t abuse them, so we rarely have to hear why they’re taking the day off. Most of the time we get a call that they’re either sick or needing a personal day with no added details.
And it all works well, until one day it was ME calling in with the crazy excuse. I called in to say (in a very hurried, panic-striken voice): “I tripped over the dog, fell into the oven, and am on my way to the hospital”. Yeah. That one got around.
Explanation: I was reheating a breakfast burrito in the oven. I opened the oven door all the way, and the dog immediately came over to investigate. In my efforts to keep her out of the oven, I tripped, fell, and landed with my full weight on my arm which was on the (very hot) oven door. It was painful and plenty obvious that it was a serious burn. I called the office from my cell phone en route to the ER, but by that point the pain and adrenaline had gotten to me. So, rather than saying “I’ve had an emergency and can’t come in today,” I left a stupid message.
Oh well, my coworkers were laughing with me when they heard the full story. It made the pain a bit easier.