k-dog said:
I would get shirty too - of course a cold isn't a decent excuse to be off work. Flu is - but flu isn't a cold and a lot of people like to go around saying they have the flu when all they have is a cold.
What's the friggin' difference?
Flu's just a cold for people who have decided they're feeling slightly more sorry for themselves. Just like a migraine is a headache for people who live in places like cheshire.
simon l& and a half said:
Sick leave should be deducted from holidays. This country's gone to the dogs. People taking time off for colds, and such like, it's pathetic. Pull your socks up.
Some people take the view that companies make enough money as it is, and that them taking a day off here and there isn't going to have a noticeable impact on the profits of the company - therefore there isn't any harm in it.
If Gordon Brown kept doing it, fair enough - but let's face it most people are just office monkeys and the absence of them for one day every so often is the last thing that springs to mind as the cause of why the country has "gone to the dogs". If it even has. In a lot of cases, the mental health improvement caused by the happiness gained by alternative activity on that day off could actually be more of a benefit to the person's performance at work than the work they could have done on the missed day would have been.
simon l& and a half said:
I've taken four days off since 1994, two of which were for a busted pelvis. If somebody's paying you, you should be at your desk.
Maybe some people don't want to be coughed and spluttered and sneezed over by people who think they're too important to take a day off. This has pissed me off in the past, some guy at my last job refused to ever take a day off even when he had a really bad cold that he was clearly going to spread round everybody for a day, so I took TWO days off on principle.
Abitrary said:
It's strange how the very cleverest people somehow get away with taking days off, because they somehow know that the average office needs a bit of cheeky in-yer-face skiving to keep morale up.
That's why you never see the less bright trying it on.
It's actually a good thing to have someone who's a real slacker in an office, 'cos then your slacking goes unnoticed - especially if their reputation is perpetuated. Nobody keeps 'grades' of slackness, they just know that so-and-so is 'the slacker'. If somebody always comes in late, for instance, always greet them with a loud surprised-sounding '
evening!' even though you yourself only snook in 5 minutes prior.