You head out on Sunday for the game and a few pints unperturbed by the fact that you’ve work in the morning. In a masterful piece of self-delusion, you’ve convinced yourself you will head home after a couple.
By Robert Carry
When your alarm blasts awake into a world of pain the next morning however, the lies you told yourself peel away to reveal the naked truth – you’re hanging and couldn’t possibly make it through a day in the office.
Ringing in sick during the Celtic Tiger era involved simply sending your boss a text saying, ‘dyin. Not goin 2 make it in 2 wrk 2day. If u dnt like it, f**ck u, I’ll find a better job.’
In these recessionary times however, with hoards of unemployed willing to work 12 hour days for a bowl of gruel and a loaf of bread, you had better have a decent excuse on hand. Here’s JOE.ie’s tips on how to bamboozle your boss with the ultimate sickie excuse. So he doesn’t fire your arse.
The toughest part of calling in sick is deciding upon a suitable condition. Get this part wrong and you could be looking at the sack. Or worse – your boss calling bullsh*t and demanding you get yourself into work immediately. So what are the rules for negotiating this potential minefield?
Pick something in season
A cold is simply not serious enough to keep off work, and you should only choose the flu if it’s winter and the bug is bouncing around. A severe bout of hayfever is a good one but again, is limited to use during summer.
No long-term conditions
You can’t come up with something which will involve maintaining a lie indefinitely, like a broken bone or a hernia – it has to be something you can recover from in a day or two and forget you ever had. So no ‘I’ve got cataracts’ lies either.
Don’t go overboard
Your disease of choice can’t be too serious – giving yourself Aids or brain tumours is a no no. People will expect you to either die or spend a prolonged period of time in hospital.
Nothing too weird
It also can’t be anything too exotic. It’s simply not believable that you might have picked up the Ebola virus, malaria, trachoma or any other Trocaire box-related conditions.
No Oscar performances
A very common mistake is when people say they have a cough, a throat infection or swollen glands. The problem here is that this involves re-enacting, down the phone when you’re dying of a hangover, an effective rendition of someone who actually has the condition. In your dishevelled state you might over-cook it and end up sounding like Chewbacca.
The winners
The key to victory is to man up – by bravely selecting an embarrassing condition. We’re talking something your boss would never expect anyone to willingly say they had unless they genuinely had it. So, we’re talking diarrhoea, a kidney infection or the mother of all sick-note excuses – a urinary tract infection. Even people who have these conditions pretend they have something else when they ring in sick. Your boss won’t press you on it, he’ll cut the phone call short and he won’t even want to talk about what is wrong with you to others in the office.
The last resort
If you are in a seriously bad way and already used up every plausible illness from abdominal aortic aneurysms to Zuska’s disease, then it might be time to kill off a relative. Your boss may or may not believe you when you say there has been a death in the family, but he would never risk coming across like a complete and utter ogre by calling you on it. Plus, you also get another day off later in the week for the imaginary funeral.
The issue of killing relatives however, does throw up a series of moral questions. For a start, it would be unthinkable to kill off someone in your immediate family – that pushes you into sociopath territory. Conversely, you can’t kill off a great aunt twice removed – your boss won’t see that as justification for a day off.
So, who do you kill? Well, you have two choices – either kill someone who is already dead, preferably someone who you never met because they shuffled off before you were born, or you slay a person who never actually existed. Your father only has sisters? Kill off his brother. Your uncle. Your uncle Joe.
One thing to remember though, is that you should be careful not to kill Joe in a spectacular and therefore verifiable manner. Joe didn’t die in a plane crash. He wasn’t shot by terrorists. Joe, God rest him, passed away peacefully in his sleep.
