What has been your most creative excuse for "calling in sick" to work/school?

I don't think I've had creative excuses.

I've only called in sick when I was sick, except for once when I called in on the day of Bush's second inauguration as part of a "general strike."

When in school, all I did was tell them I was sick. They didn't need an excuse. My parents were the ones that wanted details. They finally got tired of begging me to tell them why I didn't go to school and left me alone about it.

I have only called in to work a few times. With a male boss, all I've had to do is mention "woman problems" and they're all cool with me taking off and don't want details.

I've missed school but never made up an excuse..
3 days, and I'm ashamed!!!

I'm not very creative; mostly I just say I'm not feeling well, whether I am or not. It's been a long, long time since I've done this. Mostly because I work very few hours at a job where I even could call in sick.

I usually just say I need to go to the doctor.

Most embarassing 'excuse' - telling the boss I didn't have money to buy gas to get there.

I make the occasional excuse but they are always partially true or entirely true. I just exaggerate the circumstance here and there. Nothing out of the ordinary though.

Back in my school days, I would have my mother call in and state that I am sick, and I would actually go up to my mother's boyfriend's cabin with my mother and her boyfriend.. I did this at least every other month. during my high school years.

I'm never creative...flu, headache, etc. I did call in once and told my husband's boss that he couldn't come to work because he had been out golfing and passed out. I told them that he had to go to the hospital and wouldn't make it to work.

I called the night before I had to work the next day and said my car was stolen.

Constipation.

I don't make up excuses, I tell the truth. ie... "I'm going home sick. I sick of working." "I have a hangover I will not be in today, I will make up my hours later in the week." Just as long as it isn't leaving anyone hanging I prefer to just fess up. I have said "I'm going home depressed."

I never made a "creative" excuse for missing school or work. If I was too sick to go to school, my mother called and let them know. I never tried faking with her because she was always able to tell when I wasn't really sick.
I don't call into work sick unless I'm really sick. I can't afford to miss a day just because I don't feel like going to work. If I made a habit of that, I wouldn't be able to pay my rent or bills.

I've missed work/school, but I never made up an excuse. I missed work yesterday because I lost half my toe nail and a load of skin on Wednesday night and couldn't walk properly.

I never missed very often and when I did I told the truth. They know your lieing. I've been an employer. I always knew.

I, er, missed the bus..
Or, my bus was late..
Or, my bus took ages..
That damn bus

I only call in sick when I'm really sick. I've never felt the need to be creative about it.

I don't remember lying to get out of work... I may have done it at some point but I don't honestly remember.

My schitzophrenic mother tried to burn the house down...again. I was simply hungover. I am a horrible person sometimes, but this was about 20 years ago. Can't use that now because she is in a 'home'.

I remember that when we (that's all my girlfriends from highschool..it was an all-girls school) said that Denise had 'female problems' and we went down to the hangout for hotdogs and music on the juke box. Since high school, the only time we have all been together again was for Denise's funeral. She was killed in a car accident about 3 years ago.

I had been working a lot of over time on one job then when I asked for a Friday and Monday off to go on a trip to the mountains (a month and a half ahead), I was told there was no one to work for me. When it came time to go I called in and said my grandmother died. Hey the supervisor didn't ask when she died which was around 10 years before so it was no lie, she did die. I was initialed to 5 days off but I only took 3.I thought that was nice of me.

I have never made up an excuse for non-attendance at work or school i my life. On the rare occasions when I have been away, there has been a genuine valid reason.

I have perfect attendance at work. Even though I am currently stuffed up with a cold, the ward is so understaffed that taking a day off would really leave everyone in the lurch. The hospital as a whole is so understaffed at the moment that getting bank workers is nigh on impossible.

What are bank workers?

Not creative.......... just I have the flu, but its been years since I have done this....... from my school days probably

I've always told the truth for my reasons for being late or absent.

People who belong to the nurse bank. If a ward is understaffed for a particular shift,or there is a certain patient who needs constant one-to-one care, the nurse in charge can ask the nurse bank if they have any members of staff free. They are paid more than people who are from that ward and I believe that the nurse bank gets an additional payment, so they can be quite pricey to get, and often there are none available anyway because they are often signed up to fill cracks on other wards and units.

Some people just work for the nurse bank. It's a handy way for nursing students to do some shifts as a healthcare assistant, or people with children to get a few shifts in here and there. Most full-time members of staff are registered with the bank too - that way you can do extra shifts on your own ward without it being classed as overtime (which would be even more expensive for the ward) and without it exceeding the legal allowance for full-time working hours laid down by the EU. You can also do extra shifts on other wards if you want a little variety or wider experience. A lot of people will take spend quite a lot of their holiday allowance doing bank shifts - especially nights which pay well. That way you get paid by your own ward for being on holiday, and get paid by another ward for working there. Good way to save up for a trip, or Christmas!

The places I have worked have a group of nurses that aren't assigned to a particular floor. They are called 'the float pool', because they float all over the hospital where ever extra help is needed. If there is no float pool and a nurse is needed they may call in an 'agency nurse'. They are nurses that work for an agency, an entity of itself, and are hired out to hospitals. They get paid lots of money. Some hospitals will do anything before calling for an agency nurse.

When I was in school it was associated with a major medical center. After our 1st year we could work in the hospital as an Undergraduate Nurse. They had 2 levels. You could do more procedures at level 2. You had your own team and everything, but an RN passed the meds and took care of IVs. The Undergrad Nurses did a lot of what a tech or aide does. Also we did dressings changes and catheters and stuff. Got to chart on the nurses pages and everything. It was fantastic experience and paid some nice money. The best money to be had was the night shift. Sometimes they needed some one to sit with a patient during the night. That was easy money.

I was once meant to be driving in between workplaces (we had 3 offices) and I just felt like going home, so I called up and said my car had broken down and the repair guys would be taking so long that I wouldn't be able to make it to work. Work offered to send someone out to pick me up and asked where I was. I made up an address and they kept ringing back to check. They were on to me. I ended up spending all afternoon on the phone telling more elaborate lies. It wasn't worth it, everyone was asking what was wrong with my car the next day, etc. It was all a waste of time.

It sounds like your undergraduate nurses do quite similar work to me. I'm a "level 2" here and make beds, help patients to the toilet, clean them up when they're incontinent, do the turns, maintain fluid balances, do mouthcare, hand out meals and feed patients where needed, answer all the buzzers, assist the nurses with dressings/other procedures where needed, take phone messages, escort patients who need to go off the ward under supervision, catch and return confused patients, clean and tidy, etc. Our level 3s also do dressings, blood pressures, temperatures, blood sugars, etc.

About all that healthcare assistants don't do that regular nurses do is give out medication and do invasive procedures like catheterisation. And we get paid about half as much!!!

We probably fit better in the Level 3 you described. We did do catheterizations and we did our charting in the nurses notes, not the aides notes. Our patient load was the same as the nurses usually. If we had an aid it was more like a helper to the nurses. That is on the units I worked that were 'primary care', meaning the nurse does all of the patients care and usually had fewer patients to take care of. Primary care was in oncology because it was important for the nurse to know every little thing. Floors that weren't specialized, like medical or surgical units often had nurses who did the procedures, medication, IVs and aids who did intake & output, vitals, turning, feeding, etc. The aids usually had a huge patient load, were overworked, very busy and poorly paid. I felt bad for them so I did some of my own stuff too if I could.

On a late or night shift I have 25 patients to take care of. At the moment, nine of those are bedbound, or near bedbound, one is a violent detoxer, and three more are confused and tend to wander. There are three trained nurses on with 8 or 9 of the 25 patients each, but chances are they won't even do the turns, change the sheets, walk patients to the toilet/put them on the commode, do mouthcare or empty catheters, never mind answer a buzzer, help hand out the meals, fill in any menus, talk to relatives, escort confused patients back to their bedspace, fetch necessary supplies from other wards, get the ECG machine from 3 wards down, etc.

Not that I'm complaining really - I like to be kept busy and I'm not going to be doing this job for long enough for it to kill me - but it would be nice if our nurses would at least appreciate how much we do (as you seem to appreciate your aides) and not treat us like skivvies.

A good nurses aid is priceless. Some are very aware, organized, know when to report something. Then there are the ones that don't care at all. I did spend some time working in a nursing home in nursing school. I was lucky. It was really posh and some of the 'residents' had their own private nurses as well. This one women's nurse pretty much played cards with her all day, more like a baby sitter. The other aids weren't interested in helping me at all. I'm small and can do quite a bit but to be safe I ask for help with certain things. Their attitude was 'that's not my patient' and wouldn't do anything they absolutely didn't have to do. I also think they didn't like me because I was a nursing student and the nursing staff paid more attention to me. Anyway, I have some idea of what it is like but not completely. When I had to function as an aid, which happened sometimes, I hated it. I couldn't keep up. I don't know how they do it.

On my ward, there's getting to be a real sense of "us and them" with healthcare assistants and nurses. I hope it all blows up and over while I'm not there because it doesn't wind me up as much as some of the others, and I can see it getting really nasty. I'd rather not get caught up in it. Technically, we work in teams on the early shifts so that there is a nurse and a HCA for each set of 8/9 patients. That way, the washes can be done together, and the turns. But in reality, the HCAs do the washes and turns alone, while the nurses hand out the medication. I found it really hard when I started, just keeping up with the more experienced HCAs who would finish the washes in their teams much quicker than I could. I'm faster now, and I can't believe how muscly and toned my arms are!!!

That's too bad about the 'us and them'. What makes a great floor is team work. I had a nurse manager (head nurse) who said that if only one nurse has to stay behind at the end of her ship to catch up that there is something wrong. Meaning, if you are on schedule but some one is behind you need to offer to do some things for her. The floors with that mentality were the best to work on. Nobody was beneath doing the dirty work. (I'm not sure if I used that phrase correctly but I think you know what I mean.)

I've been reading one of the nursing journals here, and they term it being "too posh to wash". One of the other HCAs on my ward was being assessed for a training programme that he is doing. The assessor was a sister from another ward and she was really shocked that the nurses don't wash - she said it was the best chance to really get to know a patient, and I agree.

I do think that a lot of the problems have to do with the nurses being very overworked as well - they have so much paperwork to do, and booking ambulances, trying to sort out care packages, etc. that it's hard for them to actually get time with the patients. It's all swings and roundabouts.

Sometimes when I worked on the medical floors I felt like all I did was throw medication at a patients and chart. That's all I had time for. I hated it. That's not why I joined up.

I think a lot of the nurses on my ward feel the same. I thought about nursing at one point, but I just couldn't do it long-term. It's either hectic and rushed, or just really physically hard. My job is very physically tough, but I can stick it quite happily because I know that it's temporary. My colleagues who see this as their career are more easily disillusioned.

I missed very few days of work or school, and don't remember making up an excuse.

I've missed work because I'm sick, but I don't make up excuses. I use one of my sick days instead.

Only once I recall was a sort of lie, I said I broke my tooth and was in alot of pain, but I wasn't in pain and it was only a chip. That's the only time I remember lying, I am not good at it.

Purple martians kidnapped me. I was 18 and in my last year of High School.

I cut one class in high school to be with my boyfriend, I can't remember what was said.