Why did you come to work tonight, O co-worker. You’re coughing up internal organs that should not be coughed up, and you sound even worse.
Every time one of the girls I work with comes to work sick, (I only have one other co-worker who is a male, otherwise I’m surrounded by women), I always get sick too. No matter how much I treat them like they’re in a plastic bubble and keep them away from me, or how much hand sanitizer I use to ward it off, I always catch it. sigh
Oh poo. This might turn out into another trip to the veterinarian for this lion.
Oh, and I mis-read the subject line of my Border’s Rewards email as “30% Coupon and Oprah’s New Prick”.
That was a quick double-take thar.
I used to work at a place where, whenever I took a sick day or two, I would get a lecture from the boss about how he “worked x years in his younger days and never took a sick day.” I wonder how many people around him had to take sick days back then because of his total lack of courtesy.
In certain workplaces, taking a sick day arouses suspicion and seems “weak”. I used to have co-workers who would come in to work in all sorts of dreadful states. Hell, I did it too.
You’re either a lazy, malingering waste of space, or you’re making your coworkers sick. That is the attitude in many places. You can’t win.
Yesterday morning I called my dentist’s office and said that I didn’t really want to get my teeth cleaned, I had a bit of a cold. I apologized for the short notice, and the receptionist said that was quite all right. Apparently they didn’t want my cooties floating around the office.
My employer has a strange attitude towards sick days. My feeling is that if I’m sick then I should stay at home to avoid infecting the other people in our open-plan office. My employer thinks that if I do this, I’m skiving and just too lazy to come to work.
So I come to work with my germs etc, and my co-workers mutter that I shouldn’t be there and I’m infecting them and so on. My employer makes no comment on this, except to suggest that perhaps I should go home early.
However, if I take more than 6 sick days in a 12-month period, my employer’s policy is to review sickness absence as it is regarded as a problem at that level. Last year my doctor signed me off work for a week with a chest infection (in February). That used up five days of my allowance - so I was looking at the prospect of ten months with only one sick day to spare, or face the prospect of being hauled over the coals and made to justify every last sickie I took.
Sorry, that means the office gets my germs. And hopefully my employer gets them too.
Both, we have one guy on the staff. We do have a couple male doctors but their schedules vary so they don’t always work together so usually there is only one guy on at a time. You know how a bunch of women working together often have their periods sync up? Well, I think the staff guy might even suffer from PMS sometimes.
What’s the female version of a sausage-fest?
We don’t have sick days either, it’s a small business and has never really been able to offer that so people often come in when they’re sick because they can’t afford to miss work. Germs get spread and everyone gets sick eventually. Oh and we do allow people to bring their kids in on occasion if they have babysitter problems or whatever as long as they are not seen or heard. Every once in a while one of those kids will be sick. Or one of the staff with a sick kid at home, gets sick and brings it in. Those kid germs seem to be the worst and most virulent. One of them led to my bout of pneumonia a couple months ago.
The rule is though, if you’re too sick to do the most basic stuff then you are too sick to be here, so go home because you’re not any help anyway and we may as well be short-handed.
I have been sick at work all week. I used up my allotted sick days so far this year so I just have to keep coming to the office and trying to avoid my coworkers. They had a huge meeting yesterday and ordered lunch for everyone and I told them I wouldn’t go to the meeting because no one needs my germs on their pizza. They seemed shocked that I didn’t want to go to the meeting, but I don’t think they understood that if I went to the meeting next week I would have to do everyone else’s work since they would all be home sick. Stupid germs! I wanted to stay home and watch divorce court when I’m sick like all normal people but that isn’t an option for me until after the 1st of the year.
I cometo work when I am sick because I have a lot of work to do and am often the only who either knows how to do it or even know that it needs to be done. I chase other sick people away, though.
Try using all your sick leave taking your child with a rare medical condition to regular, lengthy medical appointments. I had to take my daughter to an all-day clinic once every three months, and to a minimum 4-hour brace shop visit once a month. I used all my sick and all my annual leave doing that.
Then one day my boss called me in and told me that his boss thought I was abusing my leave because I was using it all up, and I shouldn’t use so much. I told him, fine, tell the boss HE could take my daughter to her medical appointments. If he didn’t want to, then he could just put up with me doing what I had to do. Fortunately, my boss was nice and made his boss get off my back. But I have seldom been so pissed off.
I hated working around martyrs who would come in and infect everyone. Fortunately, these days I’m self-employed, so if I’m feeling lousy? I can either work in my PJs, or just stay in bed and the heck with it. It’s nice to be able to be my own judge of when I’m too sick to work, without having to take any heat from anyone about it.
My rule is that if my boss bitches about me taking a sick day, I make sure I cough all around her & borrow things from her desk often so as to make sure she gets why I would prefer staying home. Some dumbf**k here last week decided to come in with an intestine-exploding virus. They managed to infect pretty much every. single. employee except for me. Why was I not infected? I don’t eat the food they offer, I wash my hands and I avoid taking my flippin’ drink into the toilet with me (seriously, people, WTF?!) All I could think was why in the name of Og would someone come into work with AED (ass explosion disease)?
On the rare occasion that I have to take a sick day, I make sure that I explain to my supervisor that I am running a fever and therefore most likely contagious. It helps her to comprehend that it is better for the company as a whole for me to miss one day than for 4 or 5 others to miss 3 or 4 days each.
I understand that businesses have a number of sick days allotted and whatnot, but still, the way I feel is that if you’re sick to the point of hacking up your spleen, you shouldn’t come to work if at all possible.
The business I work for is a small, locally-owned place. We have locations on most islands, but otherwise it’s not very big. The office I work in has three workers, and the one who was sick is a part-timer on the night shift, and in the middle of the week it isn’t terribly busy.
Plus, our boss understands that if you’re sick, just call in, see if people would/can cover for you. Last night wasn’t busy, I would have just told her, “Aw, it’s fine! Just stay home, we’re not busy, just get some rest”.
Though then again she is new, and might think we’d kill her for taking the night off.
But! Que sera, sera as they say.
I gave her $10 to spend on a Coldbuster smoothie from Jamba Juice, let her rest in the office that evening, and handled the customers myself.
After she left and I was closing up for the evening, I wiped down all the door handles with Clorox wipes.
To the untrained eye I bet I looked like a germophobe.
Which I was last night.
That’s life in the cubical farm where I am. We have two people in our immediate area that have had deep hacking coughs for month now. I sympathize with them but neither of them has taken any sick time or can be bothering to cover their face when they cough.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve been downright rude - “Keep away you disease carrying mongrel!”. They aren’t quite sure how much humor is in the remark but it keeps them the hell away from me.
One of my coworkers has been hacking something awful for the last 2 weeks. Since I can’t see her, I have to assume she covers her mouth, but it doesn’t sound very muffled when she lets loose. And as Gov’t employees, we get pretty good sick leave - there’s no excuse for a sickie to come in, especially when there’s no super-hot projects in work.
I just started a new job, and I asked my supervisor about calling out sick. Since we do a lot of telephone work, it makes no sense to come in if you have a horrible cough. She actually told me she prefers for sick people to call out - she would rather be a bit short-handed than have someone come in and make the entire office sick.
It appears I have started work in a rational place. We shall see - I’ve only been there three weeks - but I am hopeful.
