If you've ever had to manage people you'd know that employees have some wild excuses for why they can't come to work. Hopefully, though, you've never gotten a Snapchat of diarrhea, or have had workers show up after having been shot.
rickuk88 asked managers on Reddit: What's the best sick note excuse you've received?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
So many questions.
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Guy didn't show up to work, called him multiple times. About 3 P.M.-ish he finally calls back. Goes "sorry about that but I think i might have left the country"
Dude got drunk, drove his car to the Czech Republic (about a two hour drive from Vienna, Austria, where we worked), knocked out his front tooth somehow and passed out in his car.
The whole thing was so funny, i had the selfie he took from the ER on my desk for a while.
What kind of work?
We worked at a call center
Not even a bullet stopped this cook.
Had a cook call me from the hospital to tell me he was shot but would be in tomorrow. I said to get his rest and come back when he is ready. He showed up the next damn day with his leg all bandaged up, and while he couldn't really function, damn it he was there.
How inconvenient.
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Him: "I accidentally kicked my girlfriend in the eye last night while we were both sleeping on the couch. I had to take her to the ER."
Me: "The ER? Is she ok"
Him: (annoyed) Um, yeah sure.
Suspicious...
Testicular torsion can be deadly.
I know a guy from a hospital I used to work at who called in around day 3 at a new job. His excuse was that he was taking a sh*t and pushing really hard and "blew out one of his nuts".
That was exactly how he phrased it to the department manager, no euphemism. He actually did end up having testicular torsion and ended up coming in to work anyway to have it checked out.
Hoohoooo maaaan that must be of been....ohhhh boy. Oh god no. Straining to squeeze out a steamer then BLAM your bollocks are twisted.
It can happen at any time. It's like being kicked in the balls constantly and it's lethal if it goes untreated.
Happened to my friend, ended up getting gangrenous and they took it out
#imwithher
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Not a manager, but a couple weeks ago i was at work. And we all suspected already that someone had diarrhea, because of the terrible smell just by walking by the toilet. It later was confirmed by the girl herself, yelling she had diarrhea as a valid reason to go home. So she did.
It's gotta be pretty bad to be OK with screaming that in an office. Hope she's better.
It wasn't even a office but a big warehouse of 2000 square meters...so it was pretty bad. But she got better, the next week she was proudly telling everyone that "she thought her butt was so pretty and nice."
How professional.
Worked as a manager for a medium sized athletic facility, including a nice aquatics center. I was about 23 at the time, most of my life guards were 19-22 college kids from the school nearby. One guards "sick note" was just a horrifying Snapchat of explosive diarrhea. I gave him the day off, but the next staff meeting had a segment about appropriate communication between employees that I never imagined I would have to give.
Anemia can actually be debilitating.
Cashier at Taco Bell the other day kept openly complaining that her anemia was flaring up and she got to go. This is the same one who kept saying she got frost bite from having to sweep the parking lot when the temperature dropped from the 70's to the 50's a few weeks ago.
Brain freeze.
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Not a sick note per se but I had a staff member come back an hour late from a 15-minute break. When I asked her where she'd had been she told me she had to lay down for an hour because she ate an ice cream and her teeth hurt from the cold. I sent her home without pay for not coming to me first.
These are legit.
Staff member had an issue with their smartphone which resulted in the loss of the contacts, calendar and any other reminders or notes that they had stored on the phone. Their job requires a lot of networking/phone use. They asked for a sick day to "get their life back together."
Another worker took a sick day once because she had started reorganizing her bedroom closet on our day off, and had severely underestimated the amount of time it would take to sort through and put everything back in the closet. "My apartment is in shambles and I can't come to work until it's cleaned up," she texted.
Honestly I sympathize with both of these.
All the time tbh.
I once said "womans issues." I'm male.
I got 99 problems but a menstrual cycle ain't one.
Nope, not gonna work.
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Someone I used to work with walked in with a "doctor's" note (her father is a nutritionist, I'm not mocking his area of study, but he is not qualified for the rest of this) explaining that she had broken her spine.
She walked in.
We told her that she was to remain on medical leave until she could produce a note clearing her to return to work from a doctor who is not her father. She brought in a note from a personal trainer. We let asked her not to return.
To be fair, although her story does sound like bullshit, I was in a bad car accident a number of years ago and was ejected. After a guy helped pull me out of the bushes I was up and walking around until the ambulance came. I had 5 vertebrae with compression fractures. Adrenalin is a hell of a drug. Recovery consisted of wearing a plastic body brace. I was still up and walking around though.
She claimed it had happened three days prior, so we didn't entertain it for a second.
Also, I used to be an EMT, and I'm sure people have told you already, but holy shit are you lucky to walk after being the "walking dead" as we called them. Sometimes people stumble around with a broken neck after an accident, then sit down to become a quadriplegic when they shift their vertabrae.
Yeah. I try not to think about that bit. It would have probably horrified you if you actually saw exactly how I sat down. It was pretty abrupt. The neurologist was amazed too. I had zero neurologic symptoms. Edit: in case you're curious it was T10, L1-4, and I also fractured my left occipital lobe. I didn't poop for a week cause my intestines were bruised up from the impact. Good times.
Honesty can be the best policy.
Best serious: The ones where they are just honest about it. I don't need an elaborate story about some strange disease that wreaked havoc on your life for 24 hours. I am just happy to get a note to say say he was sick and now he's back.
Best non-serious: I once had a supervisor's mother-in-law write him a note asking to excuse him from work for a week so that he could get married (to her daughter) a few states away. In the note she wrote that he will be drunk and of no use to me or my business. It made me laugh and since I had already arranged his PTO for the time missed it was fine.
This is fair. Totally fair.
I was assigned to read the Hunger Games SPOILER. And didnt sleep enough to because I was crying over Rue.
My English teacher told that was such a stupid excuse that she had to believe me.
When your schedule literally blows up.
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An intern did not show up because he said his car caught on fire. I believed him, but he still sent me a picture of the roaring inferno sitting on the highway.
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