My Health Is Better (When the Boss Ain't Around)
Fall is here, with weather just too beautiful to work indoors. Here’s a handy guide to calling in sick - and getting away with it.
“To take advantage of the last precious minutes, you’ve got to stay afield as late as the birds do, regardless of a houseful of guests, the sanguine promises you’ve made to the missus, or the overdraft bank notice at home. To heck with everybody and everything when birds are feeding and fish are biting. Stay late and lie like a dog if necessary.” – Havilah Babcock, from The Best of Babcock.
It has come to my boss’s attention that some employees have been taking overly liberal advantage of the company’s paid sick day policy during peak hunting and fishing months. Or even worse, deliberating knocking their wife up just to get paid parental leave, and then abandoning the poor, swollen lass to frolic outdoors.
Since I am the only male and sole outdoorsman in this henhouse of a newspaper office, I thereby infer that the boss is referring to me – which I do believe is discrimination and I plan to file a formal complaint with Human Resources. Just as soon as I get back from quail hunting and trout fishing, that is.
The late, great English professor, sportsman and outdoor writer, Havilah Babcock, and I share more than good looks and wit – we both enjoy a proper disdain for productive labor when it interferes with our 40-hour-a-week hunting and fishing schedule. Professor Babcock was so prone to coming down with his legendary “Babcockian Flu” during the fall quail season and the spring bream-bedding season that his secretary often posted this cancellation notice on the campus bulletin board: “Professor Babcock will be sick all next week.”
I can relate to your pain, professor. I, too, suffer from seasonal ailments that often require me to walk out of doors to get fresh air – with a 12-gauge shotgun or rod and spinning reel in my hand, of course, to steady me like a walking stick lest I succumb to my malaise. But the good news is, I’ve now got this playing hooky thing down to an art form. So, if any outdoor loving men and women out there have a few sick days to burn but you don’t quite know how to use them all without landing in the unemployment line, here are a few step-by-step tips from an experienced slacker:
Practice that phone call to the boss: Before you make the actual call, practice telling outrageous lies while moaning, groaning, coughing, etc., but don’t let the boss hear you load the shotgun or fire up the boat motor in the background. Some bosses are smarter than they look. And don’t overdo it and throw in too many symptoms or lose too much blood, otherwise the boss may actually feel alarmed enough to call you an ambulance.
Get your story straight with your hunting buddies: I once took a weekday morning off to go quail hunting with the chief of police, Cousin Perry. Later, during a town council meeting, I started bragging about our very successful hunt in a conversation with his boss.
“Chief,” the mayor asked, “I thought you told me you took the day off to take your wife to the doctor?”
Choose your disease wisely: You must choose the ailment that’s right for you. Obviously, you want to select a syndrome that is only temporarily debilitating. Whooping cough, shingles, measles and mumps are all good. Leprosy? Not so much. You don’t want to have to fake seven-year itch just for one seven-day hunting trip. Stomach viruses and food poisonings always work for me. That’s believable because my wife’s cooking skills are often questionable and she has been known to give my hunting dog concussions when she throws her burnt biscuits out the door. Just be sure to stop short of telling the boss you caught the Ebola virus because you will start a panic and then management may quarantine your office and burn your cubicle along with all your personal stuff.
I would avoid embarrassing medical conditions unless you want the boss telling everyone in corporate you couldn’t sit in on the board meeting because you developed hemorrhoids or a huge hernia in your groin area. I would avoid any condition that carries a social stigma or other moral implications. So, while herpes is the perfect outdoorsman’s disease because you can have recurring “outbreaks” every time bird season opens, the ladies in the office may look at you funny and refuse to use the water fountain after you, and you may get your own special toilet outdoors.
Unnecessary surgical procedures are great, if you have good insurance, because a colonoscopy won’t affect your trigger finger or casting arm. But scheduling a vasectomy just so you can spend two days recuperating in a bass boat or duck blind might be a bit much.
Many companies offer lengthy maternity, but only short periods of paternity leave, which is unfair. While I am not advocating a sex change operation just to get nine months off work (unless it’s with pay), there is nothing wrong with telling the boss that your wife had a new baby just so the proud Papa can get a week off work. Unless, of course, your boss is female and then she will get excited for you and keep asking about baby names and the color of the nursery while demanding to see ultrasounds and pictures. Then you will be forced to actually go home and impregnate your wife, and nobody has time for that foolishness during quail season.
Never blame sickness on your kids: The sole advantage of having a family is that you can use them for your own nefarious devices. After all, a man can only fake serious illness so many times without actually being expected to die, so it pays to have a family member that can suddenly and mysteriously “take ill.” But I must strongly suggest that you don’t fake sickness on your kids. That is just inviting bad juju, plus the guilt will totally detract from your hunting and fishing experience. Once, I called the newspaper office and told them our son had a bad stomach virus. I got away with it, but the whole time I was attempting to enjoy the outdoors I kept worrying about karma. What if my child really did get sick? And what if it was something worse than a mild virus? What if, in vengeful Old Testament fashion, the Good Lord punished me for lying and inflicted a plague of locusts, leprosy and boils on my first born? Such thoughts are enough to distract even the hardiest sportsman and make him miss an easy shot at a slow-moving quail or let the fish nibble too long and get away with the bait.
That’s why I always inflict imaginary illnesses on my wife. She’s a healthy gal. She can take a few boils and maybe even some light leprosy. She’ll be all right.
Don’t fake sick around your mother or grandmother: You dare not feign a malady around these matriarchs or it’s the turpentine or the castor oil or – Lord help ya! - the enema! I won’t discuss enemas (I’m still too traumatized to talk about it) but like castor oil, which is about the most efficient laxative known to mankind, the treatment is worse than the disease. Castor oil is a wonderful cure-all for colds and flu – the victim/patient is too afraid to cough in his or her good britches – and the old timers claim that you can rub a little bit on a pregnant woman’s belly and she will pass a baby. (They also swear that turpentine gets rid of worms and that you can rub a little on a dog’s rear end and he will pass a motorcycle on a straight stretch of highway.)
My Granny was fond of castor oil, which puts a damper on any type of hunting and fishing activity requiring you to move far from the little boys’ room, but you could still set up close by the outhouse and do a little light squirrel hunting and such, if you have quick feet and a straight, unobstructed bee-line to the facilities.
That should just about cover everything you amateurs need to know about playing hooky, so kindly leave me alone. I’m suddenly not feeling well. You know: headache, skin sores, cough, high fever, gall stones, blood in my urine, the shakes, hallucinations...
Honey, please pass me that medical dictionary and the telephone, will ya?