Work colleagues

[scottsdad]

When I had mine, I was on the mend. They sent me to their own specialist who agreed with my own doctor. I was back at work a couple of weeks later. 

The whole thing was very much around how to support me. 

[jimbaxters]

1 hour ago, TheScarf said:

Said colleague of mine, the day after i typed this, was off for 5 weeks with Covid.

He messaged me yesterday incandescent that his absence, along with his 3 week absence in February with gout , has triggered a meeting with HR about his attendance.

'I'm getting punished for being ill' was his exact words to me.

Well no m8, these attendance/sickness quotas are there for a reason. If they didn't exist, folk like you would take 2/3 weeks off 'sick' all the time and you'd never be in work.  You're paid to come in to work and do your job.  Companies can't employ people who are too sick to work, you utter fud.

This is the crux of the problem in that by saying you're sick or getting a doctor's line then nothing is allowed to be said.

I'm blessed with good health (so far) and therefore I am always at work but there are colleagues (teachers) who I absolutely know will be absent circa 20 days each academic year, a fair whack of which will be lead swinging. Now anyone can be ill but for the life of me, I cannot envisage me saying the night before (usually Thursday or Sunday evening) that I will be too sick to come to work tomorrow. That happens regularly here. Italians are utter wimps with sickness but it's still infuriating.

 

Edited July 5, 2023 by jimbaxters

[Netan Sansara]

22 minutes ago, jimbaxters said:

This is the crux of the problem in that by saying you're sick or getting a doctor's line then nothing is allowed to be said.

I'm blessed with good health (so far) and therefore I am always at work but there are colleagues (teachers) who I absolutely know will be absent circa 20 days each academic year, a fair whack of which will be lead swinging. Now anyone can be ill but for the life of me, I cannot envisage me saying the night before (usually Thursday or Sunday evening) that I will be too sick to come to work tomorrow. That happens regularly here. Italians are utter wimps with sickness but it's still infuriating.

 

Was always a big thing in my German office as well. People would start wearing a scarf indoors and you knew they’d be off for a few days as soon as you saw that. An Italian guy at my work was off for a week once because he “wore thin soled shoes on a cold marble floor” which obviously made him insanely ill. 

[jimbaxters]

2 minutes ago, Netan Sansara said:

Was always a big thing in my German office as well. People would start wearing a scarf indoors and you knew they’d be off for a few days as soon as you saw that. An Italian guy at my work was off for a week once because he “wore thin soled shoes on a cold marble floor” which obviously made him insanely ill. 

Hahaha. they're unreal pal. One colleague was off because they had gone to the gym and forgot to take a change of clothes. When he came out into the cold wearing his sweaty top it "made him sick". 

I tell my students that going outside with wet hair doesn't give you a cold and tell them to go home and tell their parents the same thing. Invariably they come back next day saying, "My father says you're wrong".

[Boghead ranter]

27 minutes ago, jimbaxters said:

This is the crux of the problem in that by saying you're sick or getting a doctor's line then nothing is allowed to be said.

I'm blessed with good health (so far) and therefore I am always at work but there are colleagues (teachers) who I absolutely know will be absent circa 20 days each academic year, a fair whack of which will be lead swinging. Now anyone can be ill but for the life of me, I cannot envisage me saying the night before (usually Thursday or Sunday evening) that I will be too sick to come to work tomorrow. That happens regularly here. Italians are utter wimps with sickness but it's still infuriating.

 

In my experience what eventually comes and bites the lead swingers on the arse is that they eventually genuinely take ill enough that they have to be off for a period long enough that messes up their clever calculations and puts them over the trigger point.  And yeah, they then claim that "they're being punished for being ill"

I managed a lassie that knew how to work our trigger point perfectly.  Like clockwork, within a couple of days of her oldest absence being too old (if you know what I mean) and dropping off the points calculation, she would be off again, taking herself back to just under the trigger total.

[jimbaxters]

Just now, Boghead ranter said:

In my experience what eventually comes and bites the lead swingers on the arse is that they eventually genuinely take ill enough that they have to be off for a period long enough that messes up their clever calculations and puts them over the trigger point.  And yeah, they then claim that "they're being punished for being ill"

I managed a lassie that knew how to work our trigger point perfectly.  Like clockwork, within a couple of days of her oldest absence being too old (if you know what I mean) and dropping off the points calculation, she would be off again, taking herself back to just under the trigger total.

And were you able to be open about the fact that you knew what she was doing?

[Swarley]

Had a colleague who said he couldn't come into the office because his garage door was broken and his car was inside the garage. He lived within 5 mins walking distance of the office.

[GordonD]

It works both ways though.

There was a woman in our office who genuinely had serious medical problems. She could be off for months at a time then would come back for a few weeks before going off again. She could have been medically retired but didn't want it and the company gave her 100% support, keeping her job open for her. She was really popular with her colleagues too, always cheerful, but sadly one time she went off sick again and we heard she had died.

[Boghead ranter]

17 minutes ago, jimbaxters said:

And were you able to be open about the fact that you knew what she was doing?

No, because A) she was always just under the trigger point level, and B) I could never confidently confirm that her illnesses weren't genuine. If I could have, my company's process would have allowed me to take action for Unauthorised Absence rather than under the Sickness Policy. But strangely enough, person who was clever enough to confidently play the trigger system was also clever enough how to self-cert her absence reason at her return to work interviews (Never anything disprovable, never anything recurring/repetitive)

[Boghead ranter]

1 minute ago, GordonD said:

It works both ways though.

There was a woman in our office who genuinely had serious medical problems. She could be off for months at a time then would come back for a few weeks before going off again. She could have been medically retired but didn't want it and the company gave her 100% support, keeping her job open for her. She was really popular with her colleagues too, always cheerful, but sadly one time she went off sick again and we heard she had died.

Yes, and that was the way it was in my work, all the trigger system was create an equal point at which the line manager had a deeper chat with the person about their absence level. People with large, one-off illnesses or longterm, on/off conditions had the chat, we talked about extra support, and that was the limit of the action. People who were just off a lot for varying reasons started at a Verbal Warning and either got better, or progressed on thru the disciplinary levels.

[hk blues]

39 minutes ago, Netan Sansara said:

An Italian guy at my work was off for a week once because he “wore thin soled shoes on a cold marble floor” which obviously made him insanely ill. 

We'll not see a better post on here today than this.  

[scottsdad]

One guy at my work was fishing while on holiday. Sat on a wall above some rocks, and a big wave came and knocked him down onto the rocks below, smashing his leg. He had to cling to the rocks and was helicoptered to hospital. It was life threatening.

10 days later he was lecturing with his leg in a cast. 

At least he avoided the cold marble floor.

[jimbaxters]

17 minutes ago, hk blues said:

We'll not see a better post on here today than this.  

It sounds mental but it doesn't surprise me in the least, there's just something in Italian DNA. Every house has a thermometer which they are completely ruled by to the point where they quote what their temperature is/was to the first decimal point. They can't believe me when I say I don't own a thermometer.

Edited July 5, 2023 by jimbaxters

[hk blues]

Just now, jimbaxters said:

It sounds mental but it doesn't surprise me in the least. there's just something in Italian DNA. Every house has a thermometer which they are completely ruled by to the point where they quote what their temperature is/was to the first decimal point. They can't believe me when I say I don't own a thermometer.

Whilst we're at national stereotyping, I'll throw in the Japanese.  They are the same with thermometers  and are never away from the doctor with some mild or imagined condition or other.  They have to fill in a form every day for their child going to school showing temperature, sleep time and what they've eaten.  And, and this is off the scale, nursery schools give parents their kid's used nappies to take home every day to analyse.  

[TheScarf]

I'm a bit on the fence with people who have known illnesses that means they're sometimes off for weeks/months at a time. 

For me,  it falls into the 'is this person fit enough to work' category and I've seen one example in an old job where the woman clearly had physical health problems and IMO should've been medical retired.  It used to frustrate me as it meant they were keeping someone else out of a job and it also meant everyone else in the team had to pick up the slack for no extra reward.

Colleagues and I used to ask all the time if we could get a contractor in to fill the FTE role that was missing but it was always met with 'no the quota for the team is full'.  Well yes, but with someone who only works 5 months of the fucking year.

I reckon my colleague is moving towards this category.  That's 2 full months he's been off, over 2 instances, and the year is only 6 months old.  He also has an appalling diet and smokes like a chimney.

[TxRover]

It’s really fun in a job that requires a medical to work, that is you cannot take any medicine above OTC painkillers without reporting it to the Flight Surgeon to be cleared to work. Imagine the glee when certain people found out an OTC anti-diarrhea med blocked them for working for 48 hours…until about 2006, when that became 96 hours. If you dinged your back, and got some muscle relaxers, that was 10 days off work.

Now, with such stringent rules on meds, they had to offer alternative duties for those asking to work but unable to perform safety related tasks…the mind blowing variety of absolutely useless tasks with minimal training required and little, if any, supervision was breathtaking. Government work at its finest. I suspect a few of my old colleagues could teach even some Italians lessons…all though not the Spanish or Italian civil servants who got paid for doing 20+ years of f**k all.

[TheScarf]

I work with one of the dads of a first team player at The Caley and yesterday at work we were talking about all things The Caley and a boy from the Fort William office came into the room about 2 minutes into the chat (born and bred FW).  He didn't engage us at all which I found strange and afterwards I asked my colleague what was up with him and he replied 'He's a Rangers man from Fort William, he's never really heard other clubs other than Rangers and Celtic being discussed so probably couldn't join in the conversation.  It probably sounded like we were talking a different language'.

It got me thinking, there's probably loads of towns and villages all over Scotland where the only football talk is Rangers and Celtic one-upmanship and the 'aww your club did this though' bollocks.

[Melanius Mullarkey]

In a fairly unprecedented move, my boss has been given his jotters. Slightly awkward conversations been flying around for weeks. Now folk are taking about a leaving collection for him…

[scottsdad]

44 minutes ago, Melanius Mullarkay said:

In a fairly unprecedented move, my boss has been given his jotters. Slightly awkward conversations been flying around for weeks. Now folk are taking about a leaving collection for him…

Wearing cement boots and thrown overboard 

[coprolite]

I had a friend at work who had a mysterious shoulder problem that was aggravated by having to sit at a desk all day but alleviated by playing golf.

He was an absolute master at playing the system and at one point had a couple of months off before returning for a day or two, just in time to claim his place on an office golf team for a trip to Dubai. 

He had HR on overtime with "reasonable adjustments" and had some sort of robo chair with inflatable back supports and precision headrests, a mister thingy because the low humidity caused issues with his eyes, desk risers, anti-glare screens, split keyboards, roller ball mouse, the lot. He didn't have any special kit for his PlayStation and couch set up at home, and didn't have any difficulty playing football (other than being a fellow fatty). 

I don't think i could exist like that at work, but his sole purpose seemed to be to avoid doing any actual work, and the rules let him, so fair play i reckon.