AlamyFrom the embarrassing to the downright unlucky, there are so many reasons why you just can’t make it into work today.
From the dog eating your presentation to leaving your laptop on the bus, we’ve all had to come up with a swift excuse now and again. But for some workers, honesty was really the only policy. And truth, it turns out, is stranger than fiction in some cases.
Sometimes it pays to just admit to your manager why you’re away from your desk because lying is just not going to cover it.
Entrepreneur, Brandon Lee had to come clean. “Sorry I missed our lunch meeting, I went to the Emergency Room because I accidentally shot myself with a staple gun.” Lee wrote “I still have the staple they removed as a souvenir.”
While some dedicated employees are so committed to their job they’re reluctant to rearrange their diary even in a medical emergency.
‘“Sorry, I need to reschedule our call, my water just broke,’” was Mira Zaslove’s weirdest excuse for abandoning a work call. Although her baby was almost two weeks overdue, she thought it might be safe to schedule a quick chat. Her baby thought differently. Zaslove sent a quick note saying she couldn’t make the call. “And so she learned before my husband, doctor, or mother, that I was going into labour.”
In spite of this, in the end the guy Zaslove was supposed to be giving a reference for on that call got the job, she wrote.
Kate Scott confessed she was once forced to call her boss from a pile of garbage (rubbish). Scott had to explain she was unable return to work after her lunch break because she’d locked herself in to the refuse area at the back of her apartment.
“I tried to climb out,” she wrote. “I eventually had to call my boss and explain to her that I was sitting next to garbage in a box. Trapped. Like a raccoon.” Scott finally had to call a friend who drove 20 minutes to open the door and free her. “I don’t think she heard my ‘thank you’ through her non-stop laughter….”
Taking ‘out of office’ to a whole new level
Working on a contract job in New Jersey Jon Mixon wrote that he witnessed an office argument get completely out of hand.
“One day, the younger of two women (colleagues) suddenly jumped and up dragged her entire desk (a large wooden affair) out of the office they shared and into the common area,” Mixon wrote. Wearing “a business suit and heels” he said his female colleague dragged the heavy piece of office furniture slowly through a narrow doorway and out into the middle of an open conference area.
Mixon wrote that the project manager then called the woman into his office, after which she moved the desk. “Not back into the office, but to an area along the wall in the common area.” She continued to sit in that area for about four weeks, he wrote.
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