Right in the next cubicle is a very nice editor who has been coughing and hacking and sneezing and rasping for two days now. I understand she’s busy and wants to earn brownie points by coming to work sick, but,
a) We have one pregnant lady here who doesn’t need to get sick, and,
b) I am visiting my mother at her assisted-living facility this weekend and I would just as soon not wipe out half the population.
Either die now and stop breathing, or go home.
Oh, ugh. This drives me crazy. Two things:
If you’re stick, stay home.
Bosses: if your employees are sick, why do you insist they come into work anyway?
hack hack cough cough sniffle sniffle
NASTY.
I’d love to, but my employer does not give us Sick time. We get two weeks of timeoff per year, and that’s everything brevement-injury-sicktime-vacation-whathaveyou. I can’t afford to take a day off for a cold. Of course, I hate most of my coworkers so it’s win-win for me.
Please may I request that you not send your very sick children to school? They just sit slumped over at their desks, some even crying because they’re sick and alone and afraid. When they’re not blowing cocoa puffs and benedryl all over the macaroni tree ornaments everyone spent the better part of a month making, that is.
That’s an overgeneralization. :smack:
I only have issues with employees that are always sick on Mondays and Fridays and also the employees that call off every other week when there’s something they want time off for and they don’t have accrued time-off to use because of their frequent illnesses.
Well, we have pretty generous sick leave (to make up for our crappy vacation and personal-day time), and she is not that busy. I told her yesterday (in what I hope was a concerned, not pissed-off, manner), “If you’re sick tomorrow, stay home.”
If I catch this from her, and pass it on to my asthmatic mother, a cough is going to be the least of her troubles.
grandmother’s comment is what I mean. No sick time? None at all? Well, that’s a cruel bastard of a company.
And I agree there should be a limit to how many days off you can take consecutively without a doctor’s note. Yes, I was overgeneralizing, because I didnt’ feel like putting a long explanation. 
Oh my. This the Mother of all pet peeves for me.
Not too long ago, one of my co-workers was diagnosed with, let’s just say some really icky contagious shit, both above and below deck, ifyouknowwhatImean, and she just sat at her desk through the worst part. Leaking her germs all over the place. Did I mention there’s one bathroom, like the kind that’s in your house, for about 25 people?
I ended up going home and working (thank God I have the option) to get away from her.
Yes, yes it is. Before anyone jumps on me, allow me to say that I was unemployed for 18 months before I found this crappy job and yes, I am looking for another, hopefully less crappy, job.
If I want to go on vacation with my family, I can’t take any sick or personal time off.
Oh, preach it, Sistah Eve.
A few weeks ago, I was at our town library. A volunteer had just come in for her regular hours in which she puts books back on the shelves. I overheard her telling the staff member the details of how sick she was, and heard her sniffling and hacking. The staff member and the library director told her to go home, that they would be fine without her. Repeatedly.
The woman not only refused to go home, but proceeded to pick up new release books and put her paws all over them to reshelve them, and hack all over the new release shelf. In particular, all the mysteries that the old ladies in town love to borrow, and that I take home to read while breatfeeding my infant. All the while, clearly glorying in her martyrdom (“Oh, it’s ok, I can do it. I drove all the way here anyway…”).
Now I’m not generally the swearing type, but this gets a big FUCK YOU LADY from me, and also a slap upside the head to the library staff members who did not show a little backbone and common sense while kicking her ass out the door.
That used to drive me nuts when I was in an office.
My husband is sick this weekend. He stayed home today. Unfortunately, I now have our annual Christmas cold, courtesy of him. Even more unfortunately, I work at home, so there’s no getting away from it. I always feel like, “Well, if my work’s at home, and I’m at home, I should be doing it.”
I really like my boss, but she drives me nuts with this shit. A little over a year ago, she came in with pneumonia. Her Doc told her to stay home, because she was VERY contagious… she came in and worked for four hours, until her boss told her to GO HOME, then she stayed a little longer before finally leaving. She sat across from a lady who had compromised health and could have gotten very sick if she’d of caught that crap.
Fast forward about eight months, boss again comes in sick day after day instead of staying her ass home and resting. This time, she infects the ENTIRE DAMN TEAM with her germs. Out of like, seven people, I was the only one who managed to get away unscathed. She was so concerned about attendance that instead of her missing a day or two, she ended up having six people miss 1-3 days EACH.
Fast forward to now. She has pneumonia again. She’s had it for about four weeks now. She has taken zero hours of sick time. GRRRRRRR… :mad:
A lot of these people (I’ve discovered) are people who don’t get sick much, and they feel that you’re just being a baby if you stay home. The one’s I’ve had actually wanted you to not BE sick, and would complain if you were sniffling and coughing, but would not want/let you stay home.
At my previous job, I used to have a wonderful boss who told me he had a “germ free” office policy. I had a company laptop, and if I was contagious I was to call him and tell him I was working at home. If I was too sick to do any work, then I could use a sick day. My company only had 3 sick days, but since “contagious days” were unlimited, you really only needed sick days for serious illness.
Everyone followed this policy. It was wonderful, and diseases rarely went around the office because we all stayed home.
Then there was a management shift. The new boss didn’t believe in sick days. She’d badger and berate and complain if you used your allotted ones, let alone working from home. I didn’t stick around long enough to see through a winter, but from my old co-workers I hear it’s bad. Everything one guy’s kid brings home from pre-school, the whole office gets.
cough cough
I’ve used up most, if not all of my sick days this year on the germ factory that is my child, Eve. Mostly taking a day when he was ‘too sick’ to be in daycare here and there really addeed up.
We’re coming up on the end of the year now, and I’m just about out - but our mutual employer screwed with the holiday schedule - so I"m saving up those last couple of days for an emergency illness and to cover the days we used to have off that my daycare won’t be open.
My nearest family is 60+ miles away, and I’ve just moved, so I don’t have any alternatives at the moment, and that’s assuming he stays healthy until Jan 3.
Meantime I’m washing my hands alot, handling doors with tissue.
If you’d like to donate a couple of your days off to me so I don’t lose my health benefits by taking unpaid leave, well, I’ll say thank you with a hearty handshake when I’m no longer contagious.
-sincerely, your cube-neighbor clone
<I>We don’t stay at work because we’re stingy with our days or to infect others. Sometimes we have to take one fer da team.</i>
Yeah what is it with Mondays and Fridays? I’ve seen statistics that show that a whole 2/5s of sick days are taken on a Monday or a Friday, that’s almost half! These people obvioulsy just want a long weekend.
Hey, I used to work in a nursing home that was really draconian about this. Using your alloted sick days would get you “points” (bad things, like anti-commendations), and being sick on Mondays or Fridays got you LOTS of points. Enough points resulted in you losing your job. It took an umblemished record for about 6 months before a point would be removed from your record. You could also get points for normal resons like being late, etc. Even with these rules in place, you had to have a Doctor’s note for all illness, or you got even more points. The end result was that the staff would drag themselves to work no matter how ill they were. You did not get points if your supervisor sent you home for being sick. I think this was supposed to prevent the long weekend thing, but it really meant that the caregivers of frail and elderly people were coming to work sick. If the staff member were someone in the therapies, who might not even have contact with a supervisor every day, the choices were: shed contagion, or rack up demerit pionts that would cost you raises, potentially even your job. I work somewhere else now.
Take your germs back home.
Take your germs back home.
Just leave me the hell alone, oh oh.
Take your germs back home.
“Wrong! Just go home!”
"Time to go! [Please, please, please, please]
“You’re not feeling ok.”
“There’s a brain answering, but it’s not taking this up!”
Could you please go home now?
We have a guy at work who likes to brag about how he hasn’t had to take a sick day in 22 years, which would be fine if he was never sick. He has been…frequently. But it is so important to him to be able to make this claim, and it isn’t like my company has any partcularly draconian sick day policy.
Ha! I can top that.
My wife is the administrative assistant to a well known research physician. His 7 year old son became ill at school (vomiting), so he picked him up and brought him to the office, where he spent the day huddled on the floor of his office, or showing off the dried vomit on his shoes to the office staff. He went back to school the next day, but was sent home with a fever; you guessed it, Dr. Dad picked him up and brought him to the office again. He vomited between the school and the office, yet he spent a second day in his father’s office, for the most part unsupervised and untreated for his illness. Friday afternoon was the office Xmas party, and the child was there, noshing on finger food from the buffet and spreading germs to everything he touched. Where was Mom? She is a surgeon, too busy to take care of her own child.
Can anybody beat that?
As is his father, apparently.