🌀 Calling In Sick

.{{rh_onboarding_line}}

It's 6:40 on a Monday morning and you're typing to your manager with one eye open. Stomach thing. Delete. Not feeling great, going to rest up today. You read it back twice to check the tone.

Nothing is wrong with your stomach. You're fine, in the way a person can be fine and still unable to face the building. Somewhere between the alarm and the second draft, you decided the truth wouldn't work and the body would have to cover for you.

Plenty of people send a version of that text, and most feel a small flush of guilt doing it. The odd part is the shape of the lie. Why does the excuse have to come from the body at all?

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get The Free Guide

Around 1250 BC, in the tomb-builders' village of Deir el-Medina across the Nile from modern Luxor, a scribe kept the attendance sheet. It survives on a slab of limestone in the British Museum: forty names down the edge, 280 days of the year, and above most dates a word in red ink explaining why a man wasn't at work. The crew cut royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and this was year 40 of Ramses II.

The reasons are the most human thing in the gallery. Illness leads, recorded more than a hundred times, with eye trouble and a scorpion sting spelled out. Then come days spent brewing beer, embalming a relative, making offerings to a god, or doing private jobs for a superior, which the rules allowed in moderation. Some men were home because their wives were menstruating, an entry the scribe wrote as plainly as the scorpion.

The crew already worked eight days on and two off. Even so, the museum's curators count only about seventy full working days in the 280 the register covers. The men were paid regardless: monthly grain rations held steady and the state kept a physician on the crew. One workman, Merysekhmet, tried to work through an illness for two days, then went home for ten.

Read the red ink for the category it protected. The list held reasons the state agreed were real, and it had room for grief, religion, household work, a favor for the boss, and a body that needed a day. Nobody had to invent a cough because it was one legitimate reason among many.

In 1951, the sociologist Talcott Parsons gave the arrangement a name: the sick role. Illness, he argued, is the one way of stepping out of your duties that a society licenses in advance. You're excused and you're not to blame. In return, you promise to try to get better, and you accept that someone official, usually a doctor, gets to confirm you're really ill.

That last clause is the hinge. A licensed exemption needs a gatekeeper, and a gatekeeper needs a short list. The modern workplace kept the gatekeeper and cut the list: vacation needs approval in advance, bereavement needs a death, jury duty needs a summons. Illness is the one reason you can claim at 6:40 in the morning, on your own word, with no paperwork until somebody asks for it.

When there's one same-day door, everything walks through it. Grief goes through it. Dread goes through it. So does a job interview, a child's recital, a hangover, and a Tuesday you simply couldn't do.

The lie in the early-morning text is a translation. It takes a reason the workplace doesn't list and renders it in the single language the workplace still accepts. Which is why the guilt has such a specific shape: the bad feeling is usually real, and the only invented part is the organ it lives in.

The translation is now routine. In a July 2026 survey of 2,000 US workers, 38.8% said they'd called in sick in the past year and given a reason other than the real one. Among people stressed by work every day, it was 52.3%. Three in four had hidden work-related distress somehow, and only 10.8% had told a manager or HR.

The body does most of the covering. A survey of 1,000 US workers found 42% had exaggerated physical symptoms to get a day for their mental health, including two-thirds of Gen Z and 21% of boomers. Among full-time workers surveyed this January, nearly one in ten had faked sick to attend a job interview.

The paperwork runs the opposite way from Deir el-Medina. Eighty percent of private-sector workers now have access to paid sick leave, and the typical fixed plan gives about eight days per year. Yet more than one in four Americans have paid out of pocket for a clinic visit or a telehealth note to prove they were sick enough to stay home. The Egyptian scribe wrote the reason in red and moved on; the modern one wants a receipt from the body.

When people do want to say the real reason, they pick a listener that can't fire them: 42.6% have talked through work stress with an AI chatbot, against 10.7% who've ever used their employer's mental health support.

Quote: "The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse." Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack (1736).

Study: A systematic review of longitudinal studies found that working while sick predicts more sickness absence and worse self-rated health later on. The authors add that the field still lacks a shared definition of presenteeism (Skagen and Collins, Social Science & Medicine, 2016).

Artifact: The doctor's note. A slip of paper that turns a private feeling into an official condition, signed by the one person the workplace has agreed to believe.

What would a workplace excuse list look like if it were as wide as the one on that limestone slab? And who benefits when the only fully legitimate reason for a day off is one that has to be certified by someone else?

The fake sick day looks like a small dishonesty. Read it against the red ink and it becomes something else: the last usable entry on a list that used to be long. Deir el-Medina had a page of reasons a person could be somewhere other than the tomb. We kept one and asked everyone to fit their life inside it.

So the next time you type stomach thing and delete it, notice which part you're editing. The need is real. Only the alibi is fiction. Three thousand years ago, a scribe would've written down the real reason and the state would still have paid you.

The excuse stayed the same size. The list shrank around it.

Somewhere in your sent folder is a text that begins with a body part you didn't have a problem with. Same here. Forward this to whoever covered your shift that day, and tell them the Egyptians would've understood.

Find yourself in the next one,

Eren.