SOCIAL STUDIES: Sick Days as an Adult are Worse than Puberty

When you were 13, if you didn't feel very good, you stayed at home on the couch, watched daytime television and a movie your mom picked up from blockbuster, and generally lounged, wallowing in a medicinal dose of self-pity, until you felt up to snuff again. On a day when you felt fine, but for whatever reason you really didn't feel like heading to school, assuming that you didn't try to pull the stunt too often, you could probably do the same.

As a grown-up, you probably go to work, staying as long as you can manage to consistently make it to the bathroom in plenty of time to vomit there, rather than at your desk, pecking away at your keyboard in between bouts of horribleness.

If you have an office job, you do have the option of taking a sick day and pampering yourself. It's up to your discretion. But who in her right mind wants to use a sick day for actually being sick? And regardless of whether or not you horde sick days for times when you really need a weekend mini-vacation, your day of real, legitimate, joint-crackling illness always falls at a time when you have piles and piles of things to do, so much that the mere thought of how late you'll have to stay the days following your illness just to make up lost ground is enough to get you out of bed.

If, like me, you have a job that pays you by the hour, why sit on a couch in the hopes that it might make you feel a little bit better when every minute you do so is lost income? How you gonna pay for that nyquil on $0 a day?

Illness sucks, but the silver lining is that you're supposed to indulge yourself on those (hopefully) rare days when you really feel too crappy to be a productive drone for the hive.

But we all know that, barring lost limbs or uncontrollable ejections from either or both ends, that's not gonna happen.

-Posted by Jilly