Save FERRIS!

I got out of class in college by telling my professors (it was my senior year, so I had all of my classes between two professors) that I had to rush my roommate to the hospital. This was a good lie because my roommate had a lot of medical issues and both of my professors knew about her. In reality, I stayed in my apartment and watched a Law and Order SVU marathon and ate the most delicious spaghetti and sausage I have ever made.

 

I'm currently running analysis and planning on the sick time our company uses. We know some employees use it the second they get it sick or not. The costs for people calling in "sick" are a huge liability. Now some people get sick more than others and that is fine, but we know that some people understand that after 3 days you have to provide a doctors note. They're sick 2 days a lot. Since all our positions are have to be filled when someone is off sick it means it's going to cost double everytime someone is off.

Reducing that would be nice.

IN addition though I think it should be changed a bit, currently it works out to 1 day a month as sick time, I think that 12 days should be changed to 9 at least and make the others something like PTO, or simply a "I wanted to get drunk on a tuesday" To me a hangover is not sick time, it just feels like it.

 

Once I spent a week on the other side of the country calling in sick.

 

I can only recall wagging high school once, and first year uni I went to almost all my lectures. However by third year I regularly blew off classes, especially those at 8am. I had one class on Health Policy at 8am on Fridays that I never once went to and still got ~90%.

Now I'm in grad school working in a lab and essentially do my own hours as I have minimal contact with my boss/supervisor so he doesn't notice if I'm here or not. Unfortunately I'm a workaholic so I'm generally here 60-70+ hours a week anyway as well as doing paperwork at home, but it's nice to be able to just blow off work or come in late whenever I feel like it - such as last Friday when we decided jetskiing would be a better way to spend our time.

I doubt I'd be able to function properly in a 'regular' job that requires set hours at defined times. I've become so accustomed to doing what I want when I want that a change to a rigid system would be very difficult. Don't get me wrong, I get a lot done, but on and in my own time. I don't see an issue with getting hammered on a Wednesday and coming in at 1 on Thursday, or just taking a day off just 'cos - as long as you complete whatever is required of you.

 

My senior year, I was enrolled in an early bird program. Since we all drove to class, my first period teacher had a few of us buy donuts for the rest of the class every Friday. The day I was signed up to bring them, I totally forgot to bring my share of donuts, and we happened to have a substitute teacher that day. Feeling obligated to fulfill my responsibility, me and one of my female friends got bathroom passes. A half hour later, we returned with two dozen donuts. I wish I had a camera to capture the look of absolute surprise and anger on the teacher's face. Somehow, we were not written up for this incident.I would have made Jeff Spicolli proud.

 

My employer pools all of our time off and calls it earned time. From there we have earned time scheduled and earned time unscheduled. We can take 3 or 4 unscheduled days off per 6 month period before HR gets involved. It is between you and your manager as to what qualifies as unscheduled.

For my first 2 years of college I attended a huge southern school where I would always skip the first week of classes. Then I would make up some sob story and convince the professors not to drop my from the class. I think the first 2 weeks of the semester were move/add/change days so there wasn't any policy regarding what I was doing.

 

It is not that difficult to understand. When people call in sick, shit doesn't get done. This can push back deadlines and cause other delays in work, pushing back meetings and what not. It causes problems for the bottom line. My company publishes a catalog. We have specific dates to get our shit done, and to the printer. If we don't we are made to pay a shit load more. If a couple of people here in graphics calls in sick too many times when they are just wanting a day off, then we can't get the work done in time.

Plus, if a company is paying you to sit on your ass all day at home "sick" ie hungover, or lazy, or partying on the other side of the country, and they have to call someone in to pull overtime to cover for you, then they get paid time and a half in addition to the money your company is paying you for sick leave, so it costs the company even more.

 

In our instance, shifts have to be covered no matter what, so what happens is while we pay one person to stay at home at jerk off while watching Oprah we are also paying anouther person to do their work for them. This means for that time the costs for them being off is almost double.(depending on the wage rates of the relief staff) Now we want people to use sick time, but ONLY if they are sick, abuse of sick time is effectively wasted money. Trust me too, doctors will give notes for anything anyways as well. Want 4 months off, tell him a story they'll write the note, they don't give a shit. We had one guy who decided to pick up a couple university classes (after working with us for a number years) then got a Dr's not because school and work together was too stressfull and the doctor figured he had to be off for exactly as many hours as he had in sick time....what a coincidence. The kicker? His position was a sleep night, I fucking shit you not, his job is to come to work and go to sleep.....and it was too motherfucking stressful. So ya, I see cash get paid out on shit like that and see it as pretty damned annoying.

 

To elaborate on what Kujager just said here, the real cost to the company is that it almost always costs more to cover for short notice absences than if the absence is known ahead of time. If you're not sick and really just want a day off, then arranging that ahead of time means the company has time to adjust schedules or workloads to compenstate for being shorthanded.

On the other hand, some companies bring this on themselves by not realistically allowing for time off for their employees.

 

I liked what my old company had. It was called Paid Time Off, PTO. This was a combination of both sick time and vacation days. They could be used as whatever you want, as long as you gave enough notice (either for a sick day or for a vacation day). This worked out very nice for me. I take very, very few sick days, and don't care about vacations. So what I would do would be to keep an eye on the weather, and take off whenever there was good wind to windsurf. The bosses (actual boss and boss above my contract) were fine with this as long as I performed well and told them the days I was going to be away.

 

A set PTO like that would have dome definate benefits, the union argues that sick time should be paid out like vacation too (they can earn up to 156 days) Of course it isn't what many have forgotten is that sick time is basically an insurance plan to help people when under the weather, not a fact of life entitlement.

Many people really do just use them as extra time off (caught one guy calling in then going golfing....my advice don't golf at the place 3 block from your place of work) When these people actually get sick or hurt they have nothing to cover them in the short term.

 

This is pretty much exactly what I suggest, don't break the days up and give extra time to people for not toughing it out and working sick or (in most cases) flat out lying. Roll them into one and be done with it. And just for the record, PTO is the universal name for sick days, vacation days, holidays, floating holidays and personal days.

How do you give 'enough' notice for a sick day? "Well boss, I really feel like I'm due in for a bout of pneumonia early next month."

 

Focus: Not getting into the ethics of hooky, but from the boss's angle: Generally, if you're spending a lot of $ and effort to spy on your employees, you're like the wife who hires a PI to tail her husband. You're already way past fucked.

Alt focus: As soon as I got my driver's license, I ditched high school like it was on fire. My school had one of those automated telephone systems for absences - if you were marked absent, it triggered a robo-call to rat you out to your parents, who were presumed to be picking up the home landline. (This was awhile ago.) But my mom worked every day, and the robot didn't know how to deal with answering machines, so I got away with cutting the maximum number of days I could without failing. I read enough to maintain a "C" average.

My mom always thought something was up. (She knew enough to assume the worst about everything.) Sure enough, one day I showed up five minutes late and was ACCIDENTALLY marked absent, and she happened to be home. The only time I ever got reamed for skipping was the one day I was innocent.

And let's just say I grossed 7 1/2 years getting my bachelors. I skipped one straight year.

These days, I hate losing track of my workflow and don't usually play hooky without a good reason. (I've worked from home the last few days, which certainly helps - as long as GChat is up, no one suspects that I smell like an overturned Cuervo truck.)

A few years ago, I had a horrible bullshit cubicle job, and I used most of my sick and vacation days interviewing elsewhere. I finally took a $15K pay cut just to get out of that shithole.

 

I never skipped in high-school. Partly because my Mom was a teacher at the school, and I knew that I'd never hear the end of it. There were a few exceptions, but I'd say I only skipped a total of four classes in five years. Sad, I know.

College was a different story altogether.

Most of my skipping was due to hard-partying the night before, but I definitely took advantage of the fact that attendance counted for ZERO percent of our grade.

As for playing hooky from work?

I don't think I've ever willingly missed a day of work in five years. Granted I love what I do, and if anything I'm guilty of over-working myself than anything. I'm given 20 days vacation each year, plus a week worth of sick-days if I need them. Due to the fact that I never make the most of my vacation time, I have 35 days vacation saved up. I plan on making the most of those days when the Vancouver Canucks get to the Stanley Cup Final!