Sick Daze

The company I work for has a policy of no sick days. The way they do this is by amassing all of your allowed days off into one pile and calling them "personal time off" or PTO. So you can use this time for anything you like: vacation, appointments, mental health days, and ... sick days. But, as you may have guessed, very few people want to take one of these potential holidays to lie around feeling unwell. So they don't.

In some cases, where their job and level in the company allow, sick employees can work from home (to one degree or another, not necessarily any less productively than they would do while in the office). Most of the people in my department have this option. But some of them, and ironically the sickliest among us for the most part, don't in fact opt for it. That seems hard to fathom, doesn't it?

Well, mostly these ailing colleagues are parents (and thus sicker than average, what with their young blossoming petri dishes of infectious disease at home). So staying home in many of those cases is actually more tiring and trying than just hauling their coughing/sneezing/wheezing/snotty self into the office where they can prop themselves up in their cube and rest reasonably assured that no one will want to get very close to them, let alone demand their attention.

So they come in. With their assorted infectious germs. Along with the various co-workers who for whatever reason "cannot" work from home (some, it must be said, purely because they deem themselves too important to not grace us with their presence). The downside of this, of course, is that in my experience germs do not recognize cube boundaries. Or maybe they do but are simply not content to rule one small region, but feel compelled to claim their manifest destinies and reach out to inhabit new, unexplored realms.

The ill-conceived "logic" of this PTO arrangement has again become crystal clear to me. Because, that's right, it's flu season. This year, as you're no doubt aware, we even have an uber-flu lurking and waiting to take a foothold. I'm admonished every time I go to the bathroom to "help ensure a healthy work place by washing my hands with soap and water frequently." (as a side note, who are these women who think turning the tap on and rinsing their hands for half a second might actually constitute a wash?! and I am sure it's no better over in the Mens' only I don't have to witness their hygenic leaps of faith). But back to my point about the signs and notices. They're all over the company. We've got dispensers of waterless-disinfectant solutions near the kitchen, signs in the bathrooms, and periodic emails updating us about the "Swine Flu" situation and "precautions".

But no one seems to realize that maybe they need to actually tell people that they cannot come in. Presumably this is a legal issue because they don't offer "sick days" they aren't legally entitled to send workers home? But airplanes can keep you from boarding, right? so why can't an employer keep you from infecting the rest of the work force? It seems to me that instead of posting notices which clearly the hand-rinsers blatantly assume is not targetted at them, they ought to form a Health Brigade. They could do rounds of the buildings and when they spot some snotty one coughing up a lung or whatever, they can escort them right out of the building with a kind "hope you feel better soon."