I’m actually off work today, with a cold. A cold that pretty much consumed my Saturday evening and the whole of Sunday. I was however very unsure about taking the day off work. I generally find it very difficult to decide if I’m ill enough to not go in. Three times, that I can think of, in my career I’ve gone into work and then have to leave early because I was actually too ill to be in. And I think I’ve stayed home and then realised that I probably could have gone in about twice.
I remember a classic conversation with my good friend Greig once:
He said ‘Yeah I’m pulling a sickie today, my heads killing me and I feel cold all the time even though its warm in the house’ – I’m paraphrasing like mad but that was the basic jist of the words.
I said ‘That’s not pulling a sickie mate, that’s actually being ill.’
So how ill do you have to feel before you’ll call in sick?
randomtask 
In my life, i’ve only ever pulled one sickie (as in fake illness), which was WAY back in the days of helping out on a milk-round early on a Saturday morning. My reasons for this were so i could go out on the Friday night without incident, but the problem was is that i’d pulled the sickie before seeing if anyone else was up for going out. So imagine how much it sucked when no-one else was up for it. I could hardly call up the boss and say “actually, i’ll be coming in anyway”.
As it turns out, he knew damn well I was faking it, but for totally the wrong reason; apparently it was a big football match on telly that saturday and he assumed i was skiving off to see that. Of course, anyone who knows me would know that I have far more important things to do than to watch football (such as inserting match-sticks underneath my toenails and lighting them). Even thought he wasn’t really bothered about it, ever since then the guilt factor has always prevented me from calling in sick.
To the point where on one occassion in a later job, I walk in and ask the boss what she wanted me to do, to which she responded “holy shit Pete, are you OK? you look like death”, which perhaps indicated that going into work with extreme fevers might not have been a great idea.
Otherwise, never had a sick day off, just been stupid enough to work through having a head full of cold, but then again, that’s what pharmaceuticals are for. 🙂
I used to feel guilty about it but I think if your not feeling up for going in to work whether it be because of stress, tiredness, illness, depression etc then you shouldn’t go in. After all this is what sick days are for and you are entitled to a certain amount each year. By no means should you endeavour to use these each year just because they are available, however I don’t think you should put yourself under undue strain just for work. The only exception to this would be if your job was a particularly important one where not appearing has a significant impact on many others (certainly not the case for me).