‘I forgot I’d been hired’ and 9 more bizarre sick-day excuses

Don’t you hate it when your new hire forgets their first day of work?

CareerBuilder recently conducted another of its always-entertaining surveys, this one on strangest sick-day excuses employers have heard.

The most memorable ones:

• Employee’s sobriety tool wouldn’t allow the car to start
• Employee forgot he had been hired for the job
• Employee said her dog was having a nervous breakdown
• Employee’s dead grandmother was being exhumed for a police investigation
• Employee’s toe was stuck in a faucet
• Employee said a bird bit her
• Employee was upset after watching “The Hunger Games”
• Employee got sick from reading too much
• Employee was suffering from a broken heart, and
• Employee’s hair turned orange from dying her hair at home

What employees are really doing

So why are employees calling out sick when they aren’t ill?

Respondents said that they:

• didn’t feel like going to work (34%)
• felt they needed to relax (29%)
• had a doctor’s appointment (22%)
• catch up on sleep (16%), and
• run some errands (15%).

Employers’ responses

Perhaps not surprisingly, many companies want to make sure their workers are actually ill when they can’t make it into work.

Almost 30% of employers said they’ve checked up on an employee to make sure the worker is actually ill, either by requiring a doctor’s note or calling the staff member later in the day.

Nearly 20% ask other employees to call the “sick” worker, and 14% have actually driven by the employee’s home.