I actually don't know when flu season officially begins but I noticed this morning that I'm hearing an excessive amount of deep coughs, heavy sneezes, and stuffed-up breathing. The woman next to me kept on blowing her nose and coughing into her handkerchief (why do people still use a piece of cloth to collect virus and bacteria, I really just don't know!) and being the borderline germaphobic lunatic that I am (at least I admit it!), I gave up my seat to stand somewhere that didn't seem immediately polluted.
I also noticed in my company shuttle too that many people were sick! Watch out, everyone, get your flu shots now! Flu season seem to be hitting us hard already.
7 comments:
For God's sake, what is wrong with you people who insist on coming to work while you are sick. I have called coworkers out on this and insisted that they go home immediately. Once I get sick, I then pass it on to my wife and children. If you are sick, stay home!
I think that in MANY cases, it is not that people insist on coming to work sick. Rather, they feel like they HAVE to. Calling in sick is looked at VERY negatively by employers. In other cases, sick call(s) might mean the difference between getting a promotion and being passed up. And in some cases, employees are told that they have to come to work, or else. This last case is particularly common among service sector workers. The fact of the matter is that given a choice, 99.99999% of people would stay home if sick. But they really have no choice.
There are times I am sorely tempted to wear a respirator mask on BART. You see that in a lot of pictures of Japanese mass transit. (I don't know whether the people wearing the masks are the sick ones or trying to avoid it.)
Whether employers look down on sick time or not, you are entitled to the time. In my opinion, any employer who would prefer people come to work sick than take the time off, or any employer who would penalize somebody indirectly for taking time off, is a slavedriver. Thank God my employer has a healthy outlook on health and family.
But that's the problem. There are ALOT of what you call 'slavedrivers' out there who don't stop to think about how someone who comes to work sick is going to sicken everybody else there. Their ONLY thought is how the absence of a single body (whether that person's productivity is going to suffer fro illness of not) is going to make things SO hard for them. Believe me. I have been there. I know what it's all about. And the REALLY funny thing about this is that the jobs where this is MOST likely to happen DON'T pay their employees for sick time.
This is becoming quite an interesting discussion about sick policy. In my company, at least for our department, no one seems to ever take "sick days" unless they are deathly ill or in some seriously dangerous condition. HOWEVER...most of us work from home when we are not well from a cold or flu. I like that unsaid policy because I'm still able to check emails, listen in on meetings when I have a cold...by working at home, I save my PTO days.
Some people are dead against this working from home policy because they feel that people should not feel obligated to log in while they're sick, even if they are at home. I think it's a great compromise. I'm not getting people sick at work or on BART, AND I get to save my PTO for vacations :)
if you have the misfortune of being near chinatown on a daily basis like i am, you'd be convinced that flu season never ends.
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