Sick

I am feeling, well, sick. Donna caught a nasty cold, complete with dry cough, fever and general nastiness. No fun. She missed work from Monday until Thursday.

And then she gave it to me. I've missed two day now, yesterday and today. I was supposed to review Severance for Losanjealous, but I've postponed that due to the continuing yucks.

I don't believe that I've ever taken two days in a row off from work. Actually, I might have forced myself back to cubical-land but for an odd bureaucratic policy. The city of Los Angeles gives us wage slaves an incredibly generous number of sick days, something like 12 a year. However, if you have more than six or seven incidents of sickness (more on that term in a minute), your supervisors are supposed to look upon you with suspicion, require doctor's notes, etc.

Now, I do understand why the city does this: people have been taking sick days while healthy for as long as there have been sick days. However, the city defines "an incident of sickness" any amount of continuous time off from work. That is, leaving a couple hours early because you're feeling crappy is one incident, so is taking a week off from work to fight off pneumonia.

So, basically, city employees are tacitly encouraged to take more than one day off work. Is this on purpose? Maybe by taking two day off work, instead of one, you're less likely to pass on germs. But I'm guessing it's just a weird unforeseen consequence of a poorly thought-out policy.

So, excuse me, I have to cough up a lung.