Secs in the city

Sick days

I don't like calling in sick. I don't like it for lots of reasons. One is because I might be sick. It's the "might" in that sentence you should pay attention to. For calling in sick often has very little to do with being ill.

I grew out of calling in sick whenever I wanted an unscheduled day off work long ago. Not least because I discovered that it will guarantee you the worst day off you've ever had. The paranoia of double agents behind the iron curtain in the cold war is nothing compared with the angst of the worker pulling a sickie.

You dwell on every urban myth you ever heard about blokes pretending to be poorly to watch the Test match, and then having their lying, shirking faces broadcast on every news bulletin aired in that 24-hour period as the chap next to them catches a ball walloped into the crowd. You are convinced that wherever you go, the boss will have spontaneously decided to go there too and tap you on the shoulder just as you're ordering your third cocktail, about to win your tennis match or indulging in whatever other emphatically non-sickly behaviour you have chosen to indulge in. It makes crowded public spaces a no-no, but deserted areas are even worse: nowhere to hide should a colleague suddenly appear. The only safe place on a non-legitimate sick day is lying on the floor of your living room with the curtains closed.

So I try to avoid it. There are far easier ways to swing yourself an extra day's holiday. Especially if it's your responsibility to keep track of who has used up their allocation. The other week was one of the rare occasions when I had to resort to the unsophisticated sick day (a need to wait in for the plumber combined with a determination not to take a holiday day to do so. Well, I wasn't on holiday, was I?) And it was as bad as I remembered. I couldn't answer the phone without adopting my special "I may not be at death's door, but I'm certainly on his street" voice. When I left the house for some milk, I had to shuffle along like someone for whom life is rapidly becoming too much, just in case the boss had decided to take a drive through the further reaches of London's suburbs. And to add insult to pretend injury, when I got back to work the next day, everyone was in a great mood because a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the planets had put Mr Boss in a good mood and he'd taken everyone to the pub all afternoon to celebrate the first warm day of spring. It's enough to make you sick.

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