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.
