Calling In

I always sort of envy my husband when he doesn’t feel well. Not because I like to be sick, but because he has the ability to do what he needs to to feel better again. There’s no way I can just make a phone call to tell my superiors that I’m not coming in and then roll back into bed to sleep again.

When I worked at my first job, it was always a pain to be sick when I knew I had to work because I always had to find someone else to cover my shift. It wasn’t usually worth letting anyone in charge know about it, since the general attitude was “so what? You won’t get fired if there’s a person here to work, we don’t care if it’s you or someone else.” The only way I could get the management to help me out with it is if I could hardly stop puking long enough to help them understand the situation over the phone.

Another place I worked later had a better system: for every shift they had the number of people necessary on the schedule, plus a “call-in.” If someone was hurt or sick or too hungover to get out of bed (this, more often than anything else), then the manager had someone on the schedule who was expecting to have to come in and work.

Today, the only person I can report my illness to is my mother. If it were a weekend, she could swoop in and whisk my children away so that I could get some restful sleep, unbothered by the sounds of screeching or crashing, or by the fear that I will walk out into the kitchen and over tons of broken glass. But since she has her own responsibilities, I’ll have to explain to my two year old the best I can that mommy doesn’t feel well, and try (in vain) to convince my six month old that mommy’s head hurts when she hears screaming and crying.

They definitely won’t accept something like, “I’m sick today, Boss, I can’t come in.”