Save FERRIS!

I am habitually honest...well, that's not quite true because the honesty is a symptom. Rather, I'm habitually guilty, which leads to me being unnecessarily honest. I think I missed a total of one class in college. One the whole four years. It was a discussion section to go over the answers on a test I got 100% on. Yeah. I took the afternoon off and went to a local theme park and had a great time.

My brother, on the other hand, was notorious for ditching. In High School, I think he and a girlfriend snuck off campus three or four times a week to get coffee at a local diner. Somehow they managed to do this even though there was a guy paid to do nothing but patrol the senior parking lot just to make sure nobody was sneaking off campus. They did notice him missing every once in a while, but he would just forge notes for himself. Normally, you can get caught forging notes because they will compare the signature on the note to your mom's signature that they have on file, and if they differ, you're busted. In his case, he forged EVERYTHING, so the signature they had on file was also his forgery of my mom's signature.

His greatest triumph was getting out of last-period Spanish by convincing the teacher that he and his friends had to leave early for practice. Often, school athletes had to leave early for practice, so this wasn't unusual. However, he told her that they were on the school Magic: The Gathering team. She bought it.

After many twists and turns he turned out all right, but I'll never know how.

Nowadays most people I know are pretty responsible. We have an official policy that is pretty anal about being at work during working hours. There is some very small leeway for telecommuting. In practice, if you are a good performer, get your shit done, don't miss meetings and are generally available either online or in your office, nobody is going to say 'boo' to you. There is one guy in our department who, between "telecommuting," being on travel, and being sick with various ailments is around about a day every week. It's a running joke. Nonetheless, he is a senior guy, gets all his shit done, and is generally on the ball so he's OK.

 

At my last job all but maybe two or three people would use all ten sick days every year, making sure to take them in two to three day clumps because of the company's ridiculous no more than three 'occurrences' in a six month period policy. Mostly people took them as mental health days when they just didn't feel like coming in, but a lot of times people just happened to 'get sick' on the exact days that they had requested for vacation but got denied a month beforehand. Our manager would FLIP when that happened, she already didn't believe people were sick in the first place (for good reason), but when people pulled the vacation thing she would either fire them or ignore their existence for a month.

The hilarious thing is that when people did actually get sick and were out of days they had to work through it or get fired.

Focus: I'm not totally against this idea since I remember hating people who abused the system and effectively good an extra two weeks vacation by lying, while I got short changed for being a hard, diligent worker. But honestly, best solution to the problem is to just eliminate sick days altogether, take whatever you offer in sick time, cut it in half and add it to vacation time. You will deal with so much less bullshit that way, and honestly, most people would rather take a job with three weeks vacation than a job with 2 weeks and ten sick days with a ludicrous set of stipulations.

 

This is pretty bad but this one time in undergrad I had an exam in probability theory that I was completely unprepared for....so I told my professor my dad had just been diagnosed with cancer and I really felt the need to be with my family. This wasn't entirely false, my dad had indeed been diagnosed with prostate cancer...2 months prior. It worked better than I could have imagined. Not only did he let me take the exam a week later, when I went to his office to take the exam, he handed me the exam and said I could head up to the library on the top floor of the building and take it there. Unsupervised. So not only did I get an extension, I got to cheat my ass off on the exam and essentially had no time limit within reason.

I'm not proud of it, but I didn't hurt anyone only helped myself so it's not that bad....right? [/rationalizing]

 

This isn't my story; it's something I heard from a guy I work with, but it's pretty unbelievable.

So my co-worker's friend was in med school, and for some reason he really slacked on studying for a final exam. He was really unprepared and started freaking out the day before the exam. So, he came up with a brilliant plan to take the exam a few days later, giving himself more time to study. He asked my friend, his roommate, to beat him up. He refused. So, the guy went to all of his buddies and asked them to kick the shit out of him. Some sick fucks said yes, and beat the absolute snot out of him. He had two black eyes, a broken finger, busted lip, etc....he looked like shit. The professor took one look at him when he walked through the door and automatically assumed he'd been mugged (this was in Chicago). He ended up not only taking the exam at a later date, and the professor told him he could take it whenever he felt up to it...it was up to him. He genuinely felt sorry and concerned about the beat-up asshat. Way to build up some great karma, guy!

I've only played hooky once. I called in sick so that I could study for an exam. But, I don't think that's too terrible...I was paid hourly and the other girl in my position was really terrible. I took on most of her responsibilities in addition to mine (I already had more because I was the lead. Also, if I didn't pick up her slack it would make it shitty for everyone. I worked for an absolute coward who refused to step up to the plate and manage us, let alone lay down the law with someone who was a complete slacker). I justified it by thinking about how I rarely requested time off and only took 1 or 2 sick days a year. Plus, I rationalized it by thinking about how this girl could be in my shoes for a day and see how frustrating it is doing two people's work but only being paid for one. Immature? Yes. Effective? Not at all. That girl didn't care at all. Joke's on her...I got awesome letters of recommendation. She was denied.

 

I delivered pizza for Domino's in college. I'm not bragging, but in a store that hired primarily young college kids for drivers, I was one of the better, most reliable drivers there. I'm not a company guy, but I'd hate it when other drivers would call in sick and we'd get swamped, so I usually agreed to come in and cover someone's shift when the manager called me in a panic.

A couple of times, though, I turned down the manager's desperate request for help with one simple phrase: "I've already been drinking." Sometimes, I hadn't even been drinking yet, but I certainly planned on it in the near future. Not really playing hooky, but it was lying to get out of work, nonetheless.

 

At my current job the atmosphere is pretty relaxed so if I want a day off I just tell somebody that I won't be in the next day so I don't think I've ever had to lie and say I was sick to get a day off. I have gotten called and asked to come into work for a few hours when I was really sick because the other engineer that I work with was out of town so I don't feel bad about taking the occasional day off.

I only ever skipped class once in high school and I managed to get caught. It was senior skip day, and me and a buddy went to see a movie but he wanted to stop at the ATM to get some cash. The closest ATM happened to be at the grocery store across the street from our high school and being dumbasses we didn't think twice about going there. As we were leaving, we happened to bump into our assistant principal who was doing some shopping on her break. She recognized us as students but didn't know our names. I came up with a fake name, but my buddy didn't think fast enough and gave the name of another of our friends. That guy, John, got called to the office later in the week but didn't end up getting into trouble. Fortunately, the assistant principal wasn't too observant because there was a picture of the academic decathlon team, of which I was a member (high school cool guy right here), hanging outside her office along with all of our names.

 

I'm legitimatly sick today, but because I had the strength to call my boss at 7:15 apparently it's not going to stop everyone else from ringing my cell every five minutes asking me to do shit at home.
Uh, no. That's not how it works. Phone is off now.



As for general rules, I tend to take some sick days when I shouldn't, but that's usually a "legitimately am a bit sick but could still probably make it in" case.

 

My company normally doesn't care what you use your time off for, however there was one time a guy got busted via Facebook for the wrong reason.

He called in sick, and in the afternoon he posted some pictures to Facebook of him at some Renaissance Fair engaging in some sword fight reenactments and appearing perfectly healthy. Now there was a Renaissance Fair going on at the time, so I can understand their suspicion. However they were from the year before, he had finally gotten around to it on an afternoon when he was home.

When he came in he was called into human resources, and written up.

Now he immediately called bullshit on them. Why?

He was on crutches because he had been hit by a car months before and had broken both legs. There was no way he could have been running around with a claymore in the mud at some fair. Amazingly this stunning flash of the obvious was not enough for them to continue along with the disciplinary process.


My company has two categories of time off:

PTO, which is personal time off, and accrues at .01923 hours for every hour worked
And Vacation, which accrues at .03846 hours for every hour worked
Each 5 years you start to accrue it a lot faster.

Over all, after a 40 hour work week you earn less than an hour of PTO and 1.5 hours of vacation. I have never understood why you earn PTO far slower than you earn vacation, especially since you can't use vacation to cover for your PTO.

However, if you don't fuck around a lot and call in sick all the time, you have no problem accruing vacation fast. I had 2 weeks off during my honeymoon/wedding, had to use some earlier in the year for my grandmas funeral, and used 2 days to go to Vegas, and I still have 30 hours of vacation and a lot of PTO. But people are always complaining about how they don't have any left for when they get sick. Well maybe if you didn't use it to play hooky.

 

I'm going to out myself as a lazy bastard here. In the past, if a class doesn't have required attendance and it bores me to tears, I won't go. This wasn't the case so much earlier in college, but near the end of my sophomore year I went to exactly three sessions of one of my economics classes - the midterm, the final, and one other class I got guilted into going to. Now that I've been through an entire semester of third-rate education in a foreign country with mandatory attendance, the whole "value of your education" thing is a loooot more prominent in my mind. I've made a pact with myself to take advantage of all the top-notch instructors, the great learning environment, and the knowledgeable classmates when I get back, because all of those things are sorely lacking in this country. God knows how long that pact will last.

The other thing is early classes. I just cannot do them. I'll get myself sleep-deprived, and all of a sudden sleeping in is a whole lot more comforting than going to a bullshit class at six-thirty in the morning. So I'll hit snooze, and again, and again... until I fall back asleep and miss class. When I get really sleep-deprived, I'll sleep straight through alarms. And yes, I set multiple alarms - I have three that go off within a thirty-minute period. My body just can't do it.

I'm guilty of the same thing. Admittedly not cancer - but I've guilted my way out of some strings of absences and unpreparedness with the story of my parents' marital troubles. I've known my parents were not in love since I was seven, it's not news to me. But occasionally you get developments like "I've started looking for a lawyer" - that kind of thing.

Oh yeah - I tend to miss a week of school a year, purely on sickness. This semester it was food poisoning, last year it was swine flu, the year before that it was a norovirus wave that swept through campus.

 

I once heard an interesting idea. If you're submitting an assignment electronically, take an MP3 file and convert it to a .doc file. Then title the file as if it were your assignment. Submit it. When your professor gets back to you about the garbled script, say that your file must have been corrupt. Instant extra time to complete it.

 

I am ashamed to admit that I skipped my last day of high school to go watch Star Wars Episode II. I didn't think that it was going to be so bad. I actually don't even think I should have capitalized the title of the movie. I never really skipped school because I had band every day and I liked it. Jesus, that was depressing just writing it.

 

I've had professors that give no quarter on that kind of thing, unfortunately. If you're late, you're late, no electronic issues accepted.

This is relevant:
<a class="postlink" href="http://philalawyer.net/2010/12/no-country-for-idea-men/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://philalawyer.net/2010/12/no-country-for-idea-men/</a>

 

Wow, this is one of the first times I feel like a huge slacker. You guys are all on point with everything?

I usually go to most of my classes, but this year as a junior I have started to get the skip bug, especially with my early classes. Class at 9? But I just went to bed at 4! When I was more motivated (see: Freshman year) I attended all of my classes, bar the rare occasion I couldn't make it.

Another thing that happens to me is that I am late with assignments and end up skipping classes to work on assignments for other classes. Two weeks later I have to play catch up trying to learn the things I missed in class. I am more efficient this way, since I tend to learn the things taught in class much faster by myself than sitting and trying to listen to a teacher that is boring me to tears.

Above applies only to the classes that don't interest me. I hauled my ass out of bed everyday for my Biomedical Instrumentation I class this semester, and I can't wait for number II at 8:00 in the morning next semester.

 

Not to worry, you are all looking at the typing styles of by far the laziest bastard ever to make it through college in 3 1/2 years (with 12 credits to spare, mind you). I regularly pulled 40% absence rates on classes with mandatory attendance, over 75% on classes that didn't take attendance, and in one particularly glorious 12 pm class, I only attended 3 sessions all semester: first day of class, midterm, and final. I got a 100 average for the course... but then I also struck up a lasting friendship with my TA and he gave me an A+ on my final research paper... which was a 14 page piece of fiction about how, starting the with the abolition of copyrights, the Earth would wither into a sterile husk in just a few short years, not unlike the planet Krypton.

I was also "that guy" who would go out and get absolutely blackout drunk on a Monday night, wake up in a pool of blood, vomit, and probably pee, miraculously in my own bed, and then sleep through my 2 pm class. To say nothing of my 9 am or my 11 am.

Now of course the occasional class would assign homework, or a paper of some sort, and I did get stuck 3-4 times with teachers who were born and raised in Soviet Russia (literally) and I had to do the work. But on the whole, the reason I got by so easily was that when I did show up, I was far and away the most vocal and knowledgeable class participant. My teachers loved me for it because, as we all know, the world is 95% sheep and 5% leaders, so the rest of the class could usually be counted on to not make a peep, and believe it or not most professors don't want to hear the sound of their own voice ALL the time.

I did have a handful of classes though where I had a perfect attendance rate and pulled B's and A's, but that was only because I would hit the rare, holy trifecta: A great teacher, interesting subject matter, and a class time no earlier than high noon. Of course, in retrospect, I probably could have turned a few more C's in A's just by showing up so I tanked what started out as a 3.79 GPA all the way down to just above a 3.0, which is hardly a "beat down my door and offer me a job" kind of number. Oh well, I had a great time so fuck em.

 

Right now I am in college. My theory on college attendance is the following:

If I can skip a bunch of classes, but still take the midterm and the final and still get an A, you're clearly a shitty teacher, the class sucks, and it isn't worth my time to attend. You want me to attend? Don't be a shitty, boring teacher that stands in front of the class and lectures directly out of the book. I own the book. I can read the book, I'm not illiterate. I'm in fucking college. Fuck you for taking attendance.

Rarely has this been an issue. This semester, I have a class in Victorian England that was boring as shit, and she lectured directly from the books throughout. The only reason I attended, ever, was because she made us sign in. Some days I wouldn't go, other days I'd make up an excuse to see her during her office hours (right before class) and sign the attendance sheet then so I wouldn't get busted. Other days I'd sign it then walk out of class after ten minutes.

I read the books and got a 100% on both exams, with her gushing over what I great writer I am. I was rarely in class, but still aced it. Why bother wasting my time? I paid for the class, I'll go when I want.

Polar opposite is my education (fuck) class. Went to every single class, every single teaching session, didn't miss a god damned thing. The class was a clusterfuck (won't get into it, because I've ranted about it enough), but I sure as hell couldn't afford to miss any of it.

Back when I worked, I did have some health issues. Mainly, I would get kidney stones that would simply fuck me up. My lower back would just be throbbing in pain, and I could barely move without being in agony, and I'd take a day or two off there. Otherwise, I was rarely sick.

There were days where I flat out didn't want to deal with the shit and called in and said I was taking the day off. I never said I was taking a sick day, just said I was taking the day off. My boss's theory on it was simple:

I was a social worker, and we had 'hour quotas' where we had to accrue so many billable hours of working with the kids in a given month. His theory was that if we achieved those hours and could still take a day or two off, more power to us. I always made my quotas, kept up on paperwork, and had a great rapport with the kids I worked with.

I always justified it to myself like this: I am in a shitty mood, I really don't want to work today, and I am liable to snap on a kid or say something that would do more harm than good. By that thinking, I was better off taking a day to sit at home and relax and recharge my batteries than I was going to the school and possibly yelling at the kids. Plus, I always made it clear that I was still available in case of an emergency, and every teacher, principal, and coworker in that school had my cell number and could call me if I was absolutely needed (this only happened twice in my 4 years working there), and I would find a way to get there.

Things have drastically changed there since then, but even with missing a day or two every couple of months, I was still one of the most consistent employees in terms of meeting quotas and deadlines, so I never got shit.