Work.

sad!

I mean, I get 6 sick days a year, so I wouldn't want to use one unless I'm genuinely incapacitated

right i get that. i mean it's medieval but i get it. not the situation where i work though.

idk it's made sense to me. maybe you've got snot streaming down your face and sneezing every 0.5 seconds, or you've got bad cramps, but otherwise feel ok. The extra hour or so in bed not having to commute/ put on uncomfortable clothes will actually help you get better in the long run/ not spread it around and you know if you just left a day of work completely un-done it'd be even worse when you get back.

so it's quite nice to monitor email, get the important things done but know you can go and lie down or stuff tissues up your nose if it gets worse without having to make a big deal of leaving the office again

yeah i have this feeling that there's something irrational or even controlling about my attitude towards this, idk

Makes sense to me as well. As well as not spreading germs, it means you can avoid letting people down through leaving work undone, and also make sure sure you don't come back to a stressful to do list.

but yeah if you're doing it all the time instead of using a sick day, and not really doing any work, you should be asked to decide if you're taking a sick day or working.

Well 2 weeks ago my grad student made a big show of dragging herself into work while still sick. Promptly infected myself and maybe 6 other people with her heavy cold, some of whom took sick leave. I had the cold but wasn’t ill enough to not be working, so I stayed home to avoid spreading it.
By the way I also hold the current record for not taking my annual leave like I should, am owed three years’ worth, so I’m not exactly milking it.

I think this happens in places where people can work effectively from home but are not given the freedom to do so, despite there being no reason for this, and so they need an excuse. Not to say they're all lying but my last job that didn't actively allow working from home and wasn't contract work had this a lot, like a way of staying at home without the sin of calling in sick.

Personally I'm a contractor so I don't get paid if I don't work - this means I wouldn't take a sick day unless I actually was sick to the point of needing to sleep all day. Like having a hangover, a bad cold or even a flu, or an upset stomach or whatever, is easy enough to work through if you're in sweatpants at home, or sitting in bed, or lying on the couch, rather than under fluorescent lights having to sit in some kind of acceptable posture.

All of these dynamics are fairly weird. As a catholic, I'm glad if I do take a day off at short notice I feel no guilt because I'm not being paid for it. It doesn't happen often but it's good to be able to feel okay about it when it does.

I mean, I dunno, as soon as you allow things like working from home the illusion of our 40-hour weeks in office starts to erode, really.

I usually do this but I work from home 3 days a week anyway. It is basically what kinder said - you're sick and snotty, but you are awake and can type on a keyboard, so you can get stuff done without having to get through the commute and then spread germs around the office.

our manager is clamping down on it though because one of the product managers has been taking the piss and claiming to be sick and working from home almost every week since she started a couple of months ago. now if you're sick you have to take a sick day. which is fine by me tbh, if that's how they want it, I'm happy to oblige by not doing any work when I otherwise could do. this new product manager is probably going to fail probation (in fact until last week she had never come in on a Tuesday) so I dunno if they'll keep it up after she gets sacked

There are some people around me that use “working at home” as a weapon. If there’s a difficult project that requires delicate conversations/negotiations, I can predict with almost absolute certainty who will immediately update their calendar with ‘working at home’.

(And they’ll harass me on what are the “dialling in details”, even though they know getting people, room and phone lines lined up is a real pain).

I've only ever been sick/injured enough one day in my adult life where I was unable to do work from home. I dunno. I guess it depends on what your responsibilities are, if anyone take up the work for you. I am opposite and get a little weirded out when people don't at least check email from home when sick. But I also want to know as little personal details about most people's lives that I work with.

checking email while you're sick really crosses the work/life balance line for me. i think having a clear division is really important. if your department is set up so that things just don't get done or fall apart if you're not there then there are bigger issues.

sometimes people really need to be told - stop checking your email on the weekend. we're not doing surgery here.

I mean, I get 6 sick days a year, so I wouldn't want to use one unless I'm genuinely incapacitated

this is really the thing. Ontario has a v low number of allocated paid sick days.

its gonna vary hugely from country to country here, let alone corporate culture and individual habit

ppl would be horrified here to be told they were expected to check their email while at work tbh

nice

people should oppose that kind of culture.

Partially thank globalization. The world doesn't stop because your weekend starts.

yeah, most people are so lazy as to be almost worthless.

i like to think of it as a tacit understanding that almost all work practiced in offices is unnecessary and its not rly worth getting het up over

This is also true. Most jobs are completely unnecessary. Places like to hire and lay-off so they have one more metric to change as progress.

After suffering through some of the most stressful years of my life (to the point where I was throwing up in the morning in preparation for the day and having some very, very dark thoughts), due to the convergence of a terrible six-year project, lackluster management, and a toxic environment - I started a new job six months ago and am continually amazed at how pleasant a non-dysfunctional, supporting work environment can be. Best decision I've ever made.

Email itself is old hat. Where I work, senior managers use WhatsApp at all hours, and share a lot of indiscreet comments (very unwise in my view).

lol that is a terrible idea

hat tip to jvc, i switched out of a nightmare gig two years ago and still have daydreams about what i should've done to some of the animals i was stuck with in the old place

that was mighty tempting, but I was just glad to have the light at the end of the tunnel not actually be an oncoming train for once, so I took the high road.

love it when you think you have a lot to do on a cold and snowy monday and it turns out to be really chill and quiet instead.

Okay, so I passed the work test, and it seems I'll be starting a new, long-term freelance gig later this week or early next. It pays more per hour than anything I've ever worked, and it is guaranteed to be a bit of a nightmare, but I'll be making as much in a month as I do in four now.

I'm absolutely terrified.

Thats great, grats

hope you can make it work for you!

i hope so too! thx!

Hate me, but I retired 15 months ago. I feel even better than I imagined I would.

"Everybody's flush with stimulus money and nobody wants to work" is something I've heard from four different people in completely unrelated conversations this week. The restaurant where I tend bar is going to close on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the time being because the owner can't find a prep cook who doesn't throw money in the trash can. The roofing contractor who did some patch-up work for me Wednesday said he can't fill out work crews. An entire shift quit at the local McDonald's a couple of weeks ago because their manager was an asshole to them once too often.

Recalibrating the future of work and the value of work is playing out in some interesting ways. One of the servers at the restaurant, an extremely conservative white woman in her 50s, shocked the hell out of me yesterday by saying how this says more about the state of wages in Mississippi than about anybody's willingness to work.

(If there's a better thread for this, point me to it.)

that lady otm!

if you’re a business reporter or similar there’s always a column waiting to be written about the “skills shortage” in industries x, y, and z where goldurn it they just can’t find the right people - itisamystery.gif