My brother called to say that he’d be working from home one afternoon because of my stupidity.
I was watching his children, while his wife was out on a daytrip with a friend. And then, I fell down the stairs and hurt myself badly enough to overcome the embarassment.
So he watched his kids, and I took a taxi to the hospital. Fortunately, it was only soft tissue damage, but I had drugs, x-rays and a note from the doctor to give my place of employment.
I just misread - assumed the March comment was actually from March.
And how often are you the one who stays home with the small child when s/he is sick?
Where my husband worked, there were sick days, vacation days, and family care days. Meaning he actually had a set number of days he could take off to assist his family (i.e., ME) when I was sick. So he had no problem saying, ‘‘Hey, olives has to have her wisdom teeth out on April 14th and needs someone to drive her home after sedation. I’m taking off April 14th.’’ I really liked that concept.
Personally my best “crazy excuse” to call in was “I dropped a frozen turkey on my foot”. I was doing home care, had a busy afternoon of clients to see, but I stopped at my mom’s house for lunch and helped her get the turkey out of the bottom of a deep chest freezer, it was the only item in the whole big Freezer. I took it out and dropped it on my foot. Since that was the year I was biking everywhere because I couldn’t affort car insurance, I had no choice but to call in to the office for the rest of the afternoon and get x-rays. There was a slight crack in a metatarsal, but no cast. Sent home with crutches and a note I was seen. It bugged me, but I had no choice.
How do I put this delicately…
They were fucking like bunnies, probably sometimes on the carpet.
I don’t get too many outrageous ones, mostly they’re just stupid. Or the teen workers I supervise know enough that if they keep it simple and only miss one shift I don’t give a shit why they’re out. But there were two times that took the cake, both revolving around final exams.
Let’s call the first one Lois. Lois calls at about 3:00 to say she might be a little late to her 5-9 shift. She qualified for “extended test time” and her 12:00 exam was giving her trouble, so she didn’t know when she’d be in. She didn’t think it would be any more than a few minutes after five. I asked her to call again in case it would be later than that.
Five comes and goes. She doesn’t show. 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 7:00. She was a terrible worker anyway, so her not showing up was no big loss. Her not calling was troubling, but she fixes that the next morning. She tells me she couldn’t finish her exam until 7 and by then her shift was already half over, so she didn’t come in. Also, it was hard to get to work then. As for why she didn’t call, she said that the proctors who ran the exams didn’t let anyone leave the room. Not even to go to the bathroom. So she definitely couldn’t use her cell phone during it. Except she called me at 3 to say she would be late and work is right next door to her school…
So yeah, Lois was not the brightest bulb in the bunch.
But Joy was even stupider. I was away from my desk so Joy left me a message one day telling me she wasn’t coming in. She had a final exam that starts at 4 she says into my voice mail, so there’s no way she can make her 5-9 shift. Except the school sends the final exam schedule to us in the mail every year. And all of the exams are scheduled for 12 or 3.
Whoops… Joy never actually showed up for any of her shifts after that day and never called in to tell us she was sick either. Eventually her mother leaves another message on my VM saying “Joy is sick and she’ll come back when she’s good and ready” (direct quote). I fired her over the phone (leaving a message because she didn’t pick up) and her final check was mailed to her house. It came back that she didn’t live where she said she lived so she never got her final check.
At my previous job our 3IC was addicted to World of Warcraft, to the point where’d he vanish out the door on the dot of closing time because he was leading his guild in a raid, leaving me to close the store on my own. This was a massive security problem for obvious reasons and after repeatedly asking- nicely- him to refrain from doing this I finally went to the store manager and demanded our 3IC be written up for it.
His response was “He’s been here longer than you and he comes in early to help open the store” (Not the point and No, he didn’t)
I resigned a fortnight later.
So, yeah, “I had a raid on [in World of Warcraft]”. Pretty lame, Milhouse.
I have some 800 hours of sick leave saved up. Obviously, I don’t take every other Monday off because I’m…… chough…… sick. I have responsibilities and get things done.
I don’t have to worry about a horrendous cold or flu that takes me out of work for a week. I really like it that way.
And because I have so much sick leave saved up, I get an extra 2 days of ‘well pay’ a year. Basically 2 more vacation days. Of which I have 20 days a year. And 11 paid holidays.
It’s all I can do to use the stuff up. I still have to do my job, that is how I am rated. That’s how I think It should be.
I really want more options to work from home. I already do when I’m sick.
After a horrendous end of the year, and rough start of the new, we don’t get PTO anymore, and won’t for the foreseeable future. I was sick two days a couple of weeks back, and my boss paid me for one so I’m feeling pretty lucky right now.
I have a co-worker that appears to be unable to work on Mondays. Which, with what she does, and the way money is right now, all she would have to do is tell the boss that she won’t be working on Mondays. (She’s part time) But no, she makes up lame excuses.
Last Monday, she “lost track of the time.” She couldn’t believe that the first time she looked at the clock “it was already 11:30!” So she was going to go have lunch, and then come in. She showed up after 2:00 then left at 3:00 to pick up her kids.
The Monday before that, she had a melt-down day, and couldn’t handle calling in.
Twice now she’s been no-call no-show and claimed that she couldn’t find her phone to call in.
She has three kids that tend to get sick on Mondays and Fridays. And they are some sickly kids, I’ll tell ya.
There’s more, but that’s all off the top of my head.
The kicker is, is that I’m the go-to “guy” in our office. You know how every (IMO) small business has someone that’s the backbone of the company? Well, that’s me. I spend more than half the days she bothers to show up in a power struggle with her! She wants the same regard that I have, and gets really pissy when she doesn’t get it. I feel like telling her she’d have to work at least a 40 hour week to even come close, not to mention the 50 - 60 that I typically put in.
I don’t think we’re going to keep her on much longer, as it’s getting harder and harder for me to deal with her. She’s the sister of a dear friend of my boss so he’s been pretty patient, but I’ve about had enough!!
I teach college classes, and, since the economy has tanked, the attendance has actually improved, so absenteeism isn’t so much of an issue anymore. Also, I no longer have to take roll. People pretty much drop classes of their own volition now, though college policy says I could drop them myself if they have more than X number of absences before the withdrawal date.
Anyway…here is a classic excuse from way back:
“I won’t be in class today because I’m getting my hair braided.”
RE: our own absences…I don’t know what it is for FT on my campus without consulting the contract, but for those of us who are PT (which accounts for the majority of college profs these days), it’s this:
you accumulate one hour of sick leave for every 18 hours you teach. This piles up indefinitely. You can also transfer it from one campus to another if you abandon one campus completely and opt to teach at others instead. And I think you can get retirement credit for the unused sick leave hours–not that most of us can ever afford to retire.
You can also take personal necessity leave but it is calculated a bit differently. You don’t have to give a reason, and you’re not supposed to do it more than a few times in a semester or year.
You can ask for, and even choose your own, subs if you are going to miss more than one meeting of a 2x/week class, or if you teach a class that meets only once a week and it would throw off your schedule too much to cancel it. There is some leeway here, as our syllabi can vary greatly.
You can get a long term sub if you are going to be out of commission for several weeks or even the majority of the semester. Things happen.
We also have a catastrophic leave pool of sick hours which can be donated to those who are running out of theirs. You must donate to it in order to be eligible as a receiver. Not every campus offers this.
My dept. and division were great about working with me recently when I had surgery (quite unexpectedly) and had to miss four class meetings in a row: Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I got the subs I wanted, and another prof was nice enough to take some papers to the dept. for the subs and pick up stuff from my box and bring them to me so I could do some work at home.
I think I’m luckier than most.
In her defense, if it was a full set of corn row-type braids, a braiding session can last from 4-9 hours, depending on hair length and width of the braids.
Just sayin’… 
Cornrows can actually be much faster than free braids all over the head like this. A style like that can take upwards of 18 hours over the span of two days, depending on the thickness of the braids and length of the hair. And you take your braider’s appointment when s/he has one, they’re in high demand and obviously supply of time is limited.
Assuming you prioritize your hairdo over your college education or your job.
Here are some of my reasons for calling in:
Lived out in the country with one main road into the cities. It had snowed, the roads were icy. Thought I gave myself enough time, but it was bumper to bumper and slow going. I was already almost an hour late when traffic came to a standstill due to a turkey truck turn over that shut the highway down completely. TheKid, a preschooler at the time, had to go to the bathroom, I was stressed (had been driving for over 2.5 hours for a usually 30 minute drive), and going the long way around would’ve meant I had to go back almost all the way home anyways. By the time I got home it was over 2 hours past my scheduled start time. There was a message from my supervisor sternly requesting a call as soon as possible. Called her - “Turkey truck flipped. Turkeys everywhere” After she quit laughing, she okayed my leave for the day.
A little over a month ago I called in late as I missed my alarm clock (new clock, thought I had set it correctly). As I was getting into my car I slipped on ice, wrenched my bad knee, cracked my head on the doorframe. My boss received a harried call at 730 stating I’d be in as soon as possible, then another call at 745 saying “never mind”. I spent the day icing my knee and noggin.
*A few years ago I used my lunch break to go to a doctor appointment for a lingering headache. Due to other issues, the doctor immediately sent me down for a MRI to check for possible aneyurism. On my way to imaging I called my boss sobbing - it was pretty scary - saying I wouldn’t be back that day. She was very good about it.
In a couple different jobs, we had to send people home because a member of the Grateful Dead had died. In the first case, the job situation was such that it wasn’t a big deal to send them home, and in the second, it was our otherwise star worker, so we cut her slack.
From that, you can guess we also faced this situation, of course:
Though actually, the one time I know for sure someone was on acid, they did a great job that day.
At the hospital where I work, there is no sick leave, AND no holiday pay. You want to take Christmas off, you take 8 hours of leave. The theory being it’s a 24/7 workplace. They don’t distinguish between pateient care positions where 24/7 care is really needed, and administrative or other support positions where it’s not.
Still, you can roll over your leave to the next year, accumulate up to 360 hours, and sell some of it back for cash if you want to. The people with the roughest time are people who are hired late in the year and actually go into leave-debt to take off Thanksgiving, CHristmas and New Years.
And we don’t even have PTO, we have E(arned) TO: we start with nothing and we earn leave based on hours worked. We earn just under 8 hours of ETO for every pay period, if you’re full-time. Works out to about 22 days a year.
It’s great though, after you’re here for a while. I have more than 200 hours, and I could take a week off and pay for a decent vacation by selling another 40 or 80 hours back.
I had a drunk co-worker who called in sick for 3 dead grandmothers in the space of 3 months.
Now, I could understand more than 2 grannies. It’s conceivable to have two naturals and one or more adoptive/step grannies. But all dead within 3 months?
But what finally got management to demand “rehab or the highway” from this joker was when he called up 2 hours into the shift and said he and his wife had had a car wreck and were both in the emergency room. The soon-to-be-ex-wife called not 10 minutes later to ask to speak with her husband and when told what he had said stated to the foreman said, “I’m not in the emergency room, yet. But when I catch up to him, we’re going there to get my foot out of his ass.”
Er, that’s pretty much how PTO works as well. You earn so much with every pay period and then use it as needed. At least, that’s how it’s worked every place I’ve worked with PTO instead of separate vacation/sick time.
Places that had separate vacation/sick time, you earned the vacation the same way - a set rate per pay period. Sick days were a set # per year, were not ‘earned’, and you didn’t get paid for them if you quit/were fired.
I called in sick with a cough once. For 3 months. It was a really, really bad cough. 
Work was actually not the upset about it, they just needed a doctor to sign off on it. My doctor, OTOH, was a pain in the ass. I couldn’t get in to see a specialist for a week, but my regular doctor didn’t want to write a note for absence from work for that long. Because it was just a cough. Blacking out from lack of oxygen because I was coughing too hard to breath? Not good enough for my doctor. :mad:
It’s the first place I’ve worked with zero guaranteed leave. Other places put 14 days, or whatever, in your ‘bank’ on January 1, which you could then take during the year. Even when you started at zero, after some point like 3 or 6 months, your leave would be made available. And also the first place I’ve worked with no paid holidays.
