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A mind-boggling amount of professional productivity was likely lost come Monday morning after St. Paddy’s Day. Absenteeism from workplaces, one presumes, was epidemic. Mass hangover-itis was surely the culprit, though a vast majority of its sufferers likely made-up other stories to cover their drunk-sick asses. Unless you’re your own boss, you’ve someone to report to when you decide to call off, and telling them you’re suffering the predictable effects of an Irish Car Bomb, green beer, weed, and God-knows-what-else bender just doesn’t seem like the way to go.
On any workday immediately following a holiday especially notorious for overindulgence, extra careful consideration must be given to the lie one attempts to tell in exchange for a pass on putting in an honest day’s work afterward. Shell-shocked and left standing in the post-pandemic’s staffing rubble, many employers have become bitterly cynical and defensive. Feeble attempts at citing symptoms we say we’ve come down with in the hope of sounding contagion alarms are likely to be met with learned responses that could cost us dearly in enforced, extended absences and/or reasonable requests that we provide medical documentation supporting our claims prior to returning to gainful employment. Calling out with COVID-y symptoms these days could ultimately cost one a week’s wages and the price of a PA’s note from that entirely unnecessary Urgent Care appointment you had to make to call your boss’s calling bullshit on your bullshit sick call.
Instead, if you’re going to insist you’ve suddenly found yourself in no condition to come in to work on, say, the day after Memorial Day, or July 5, January 1, and the like, I suggest getting more gastrointestinally creative. I’ve got two words for you to remember in such circumstances: rectal secretions. The next time you feel the need to plead physical infirmity as a made-up excuse for missing work, tell your supervisor you’re suffering from an oozing from the one orifice no one in this world wants anything to do with other than their own, far more often than not.
So, phone in and claim you woke up, went to the bathroom, and found blood in your stool.
Before anyone starts chiming in to castigate me for making so repugnant and repulsively specific a suggestion, let me say just two more things in my defense: This is not something I dreamed up on my own, and it worked really well once when I actually tried it myself.
Remember Mad TV? Airing for fourteen seasons until 2016, the Mad magazine-based show spoofed every corner of American culture. No topic was too taboo, and in one episode, the subject of calling in sick from work was tackled in a skit that put some of our most go-to excuses to music. With a band striking up a sing-a-long kind of tune, three performers marched out onto a stage, each with telephones they started taking turns phoning in phony illnesses to.
“I woke up today looking chalky and gray,” the first sang to that effect.
“I won’t be in. I’ve got hives on my skin,” the second sounded off. And so it went for a few rounds, with three Mad tenors belting out the same old excuses we’ve all made to take a “sick” day off. The third guy ultimately brought down the house with one malady nobody, apparently, had either heard or used before, myself included.
“I can’t come to work I’ve got blood in my stool!” he belted before breaking character and laughing out loud. I just saw it as funny at first. Then I thought, hmmm.
Sure enough, maybe a month or so after that show, I found myself yet again unmotivated to work one of my waiter shifts. Having already fabricated a few reasons not to come in over the course of my short tenure where I’d been employed at the time, I pondered what extenuating circumstances might remain plausible to my manager, Pat. I’d previously told her falsely that a close aunt had died, the same one I’d killed-off a year or so prior when I’d served elsewhere, as part of a ruse to play hooky and enjoy an impromptu weekend in San Diego. After claiming my intentions to catch a flight home to Detroit (from Phoenix) to attend her October funeral, suspicions were raised which ultimately resulted in my firing after I returned to duty with a sunburn three days later. I vowed to get smarter with my deceptions after that.
“Pat, it’s Robert,” I tried to sound appropriately uncomfortable and upset when she answered my call. “I think I have a problem.”
“What’s up?” She sounded busy and maybe a bit skeptical.
“I woke up this morning, went to the bathroom, and found blood in my stool.”
Silence. I instantly felt found-out. She’d seen the show, was my next thought. I was sure of it.
“Robert, you need to get to a doctor immediately or just go to an emergency room.” Pat broke back in, sounding seriously concerned all of a sudden. “That is not something that should be happening. Go. Just let me know when you know something.”
“I will, Pat. I better go. I’ll let you know.”
I took the next two days off, getting stoned and staying indoors while trying to figure out what to say when I returned to work. I’d learned a little about rectal polyps and anal fissures by that point in my life, so I arrived ready to blame the whole fictitious episode on the latter when I reported back three days later. But Pat just asked me how I was and never said another word after I assured her I was good to go.
From sickness and car trouble to court appearances and child care issues, there are only so many cards to play in the liar’s poker game of excuse-making for missing work when we’re too lazy, hungover, or whatever to get out of bed and head in.
But that butt thing is an ace in the hole.
