This is a question about taking Sick Days at work (or staying home from school if you are a full-time student). How sick do you have to be? What factors tip the scales when you're deciding whether to stay home sick or not? How do you handle being sick?

I tend not to get sick. When I take a sick day from work it is usually a lack of sleep day. I will usually only do this when I know that I have no work to do that day. Typically at the end of the year I will have most, if not all, of my sick days left.

Most of my illnesses are stress related. I'll get tired or run down, and then I'll catch some evil sickness that is going around, and I'll be down for a good 3-5 days. And when I get sick, I mean don't leave the bed for 3 days sick. I think it is my body's way of forcing me to rest. Luckily, I don't get sick very often, but when I do, I like to be babied and not have to worry about doing dishes or making lunch or entertaining the cat.

For "legitimate" sick days, I go by how contagious I think I am. I rarely get so sick that I am unable to work.

I am a full-time student, and if I feel sick on a day there is a test I did not study for, I will go all-out to stay home. It doesn't really matter how sick I am then. It could range from a mild stomach ache to the black plague and I'd MAKE it enough to stay home. I guess that's just the way I am. If I don't like it, I try to avoid it. Not the best way to get by in the world, I know I know, but the way of a lot of us lazy students.

I don't get sick very often. I'll only stay out if I'm worried about other people catching whatever I have ... I have a pretty quiet job and my own office so I can just as easily nurse myself back to health at work. I don't mind working from home if I'm actually really home sick.

If I have enough sick/vacation time, I tend to stay home at the beginning of an illness, when it might help to sleep half the day. After that, if I get sick anyway, I go back to work unless I have a really sore throat (I do phone support), have a fever, or can't think clearly. Work does not believe in the "stay home and keep your germs to yourself" theory.

How sick I have to be to stay home depends on what's going on at work that day. There have been times when it was just entirely the wrong time to be sick, so I've dragged my sorry ass into work when I felt like death would be a distinct improvement. There have been times when I've been less sick than that, but still stayed home because I'd get better faster and be less likely to make my co-workers sick, and I didn't have anything that absolutely HAD to get done that day.

I've often said that if I'm going to take a sick day, I'd rather take it before I make myself sick than afterwards. At least that way I get to enjoy the day off. More generally, I tend to take days off whenever I really don't want to go to work, and if I find I'm taking too many of them that's typically a sign that something is wrong in my job or my life.

excellent array of sick choices! I've tried to work through all sorts of illnesses, but if I have a temp of 102+, I stay home -- also anytime the DR says I must.

It takes more than a little fever, headache, or coughing to keep me out of work, but I'll stay home sick with much less than the Mongolian Death Flu, too. Before the kids started school, it was actually more restful for me to go to work than stay home when I was sick!

If I am sick I go to work. If I'm going to be miserable then I might as well be miserable someplace that makes me so normally. Sick days are fun days, vacation days are fun days, and personal days are fun days. If I use them all, so what I'll only get paid for 32 hours that week. Big deal. I don't make a lot per hour, there isn't a great big difference.

I was brought up with a very strong work ethic. There was a time i would go to work no matter how i felt. (Being a "mom" you learn to function even if you're bleeding from your eyeballs). The management of today has changed...expect more for less appreciation. Now if I get fed up with the politics in the office I call in. It doesn't happen very often and when it does I more than pay for it playing "catch up".

I like this survey, though I really can't check many answers.
I used to pretend to get sick when I was younger, mostly because I wanted to avoid going to school (where I wasn't especially happy). I would fake having a stomach ache (which seemed the easiest to fake), but I wanted to do a convincing job (and perhaps I felt guilty for faking) so I would really try to feel it, and I would usually be able to feel a little queasy. I almost got in trouble for missing a lot of days in 4th grade by doing this (my mom wasn't home either - I think she was working by then, she didn't always know I stayed home). I have a strong belief that this "technique" I used to fake stomach pain triggered the intestinal disease I now live with. It's crazy I know, but I can't let it go. I hardly ever stay home sick now. I sometimes come in late and/or leave early though (mostly because I get distracted with something else). No one at work seems to care when I miss work, perhaps I could get away with even more! Still, I think I'm highly valued where I work and they simply treat me like the professional that I am.

We have a bonus program, no sick days all year & get 3 extra vacation days. That is a nice incentive, but I just get too far behind if I'm off; no one does my work while I'm gone. I very rarely take sick days, but before I do, I ask myself...if I stay home sick will I feel like working around the house? If I feel like working at home, I can go to work. Also, do I think I need to see the doctor? If I'm that sick, I need to stay home. I used to worry about spreading possible infections around, but the doc told me that if you have a virus, you are shedding it for five days before you show symptoms anyway. I do work with a bunch of the sickest people I have ever been around. I'm afraid I have a low tolerance for 'sickies.' One of them is always amazingly well for vacation or special outings, but can barely get thru most work days because she feels so awful. Also, my mother always said "Call in sick when you aren't & you will be sick." I think she put a curse on me because I did that on my first job & I got very, very sick. So sick that they were calling me to find out when I was going to come back. I learned my lesson.

***bill, I don't think that's crazy at all. Or, at least, my anecdotal evidence backs up your anecdotal evidence- I used to pretend to be sick to stay home, and when ever I did that, I managed to, in fact, be sick for a few days.

***bill: When I wanted to get out of going to school, my favorite technique was the heating pad on the face. Then mom or dad would come in, "I don't feel good", feel the face, "oh my god you're burning up, stay in bed." Mission accomplished.

Where I work there is no strick written rule for sick days. I could take a week off in theory. There are of course the unwritten rules... I tend to be a lot more prone to take the day off than I was in high school, because there's hardly a day where I absolutely have to be there. In college it wasn't so much taking the entire day off as it was skipping classes here and there, which I did at abundance, hardly ever for health-related problems.

I don't get sick very often, but I can usually tell when it's coming. Those times I'll take a sick day even though I'm not sick yet which usually heads it off beforehand. Of course, there are also mental health days....

I enjoy work a lot, and always have more to do here (at work) than time to do it in, so I tend not to take sick days unless I have a good reason. But "good reason" for me can include a lot of health-related things, including taking care of other sick family members, going to the doctor's, etc. ***steve: what you said, yeah.

heh. prior to my spirit being crushed at my current job, I would only take a sick day if I had the mongolian death flu or had hacked up a major organ. now, I take them if I am simply feeling off... basically on a day I feel kind of sick, I win the daily arguement about whether I go to work or not

it depends on the job. missing one day of teaching really screws up the whole class, and would likely make the students miserable as i tried to catch up again (even if they enjoyed the bonus free day). if i taught a class on a normal schedule, it probably wouldn't matter so much, but the classes i teach are either accelerated one-semester-in-five-weeks courses or meets-only-once-a-week-for-a-real-long-time courses. if it is at all avoidable, i don't miss class.

on the other hand, if i don't have to teach that day, i don't mind missing my other job. i don't mind a bit of catch up at work in exchange for a nice restful day at home getting better.

Having a single indispensible employee is a sign of bad management. So is an abundancy of sick days. I wouldn't work at a place that took my vacation away when I got sick.

I haven't been sick at all for upwards of five years now. I really don't remember. I used to be pretty wussy about it though, I seem to recall. Sore throats being the thing that would fell me. I HATE having a sore throat.

A year ago or so, I was sick at work. And in the small machine room, staring at all the little machines, with their little blinky LEDs. And I looked at on of the main servers and thought "That light shouldn't be on" or such. And started to reach out my hand to power down the machine. Then my brain reasserted itself and stopped my hand. I went home after that, figuring I'd do more harm than use. I tend to get that way when sick.

I detest when otherwise perfectly good SEPARATE answers are lumped together as though they were one. I don't need to be sick at all to take a sick day, but I do not refer to them as "mental health days." They want me at work whether I am sick or well, but they are not selfish jerks (just regular jerks). And I can't afford to be sick, but I *don't have* sick days or vacation days to save! If I don't go to work, I don't get paid, and I need the money. I do like the last option, and checked it.