‘Bosses, what are most imaginative reasons people have called in sick?’ – 23 employees who really wanted a duvet day

If you’ve been lucky enough to have spent the Christmas holidays thinking about food, drink, fun and definitely not your job, then returning to work this week will be painful. So painful in fact, that you might be considering sacking it all off for another day.

However, if you’re going to call in sick, you’ll need a very good excuse. They’ve been chatting about the sometimes very tenuous reasons people use to cry off work on the AskUK subreddit after ChanceDesign5322 asked this…

Bosses of Reddit, whats the best/worst/most imaginative reason people have called off work?

About 20 years ago I went out drinking the night before work. Got too drunk to go in and didn’t bother calling. Rang in three days later claiming that someone had spiked my drink with speed and I’d spent two days bouncing off the walls and not sleeping.

I think it worked, I didn’t get into trouble.

Risky, but it paid off. And plenty of other people chipped in with their own experiences of skiving, with varying degrees of success, like these…

1.

‘Their Mother had died, which is odd as she worked in the local Tescos and had just served me.’
–spanglesandbambi

2.

‘I had someone tell me his Nan had died and he was too upset to come in. His mum worked for the same firm and had sent me an email a few minutes before that said ‘If BIlly comes up with an excuse for not coming in he’s a liar. He was out on the lash until 3am and then came back and puked on the sofa.’ When I told her the excuse was that her own mum had died she went apeshit.’
–smoulderstoat

3.

‘It was raining, they couldn’t get a lift and didn’t want to walk as they had fake tanned the night before and they didn’t want it to streak.’
–unhappy_babbling

4.

‘Not the boss in this scenario but I was the person phoning in. I was only due to be at work for a couple of hours first thing in the morning and I got woken up by the police who were doing a massive armed raid on my next door neighbour and wanted to come through my house and go over the garden fence to block the back exit of the neighbour’s house. They were also out the front.

Police suggested I didn’t go out while they were doing their raid so I phoned in with that as my excuse. Boss was super interested and said it was fine so I spent the time watching goggle-eyed out of the window and enjoying watching my terrible neighbour get arrested at last.’
–reader270

5.

‘Many years ago in my youth me and a friend ended up at an all night house party on a weekday.We were still partaking at 7am when we started work at half 8 so we decided to both come up with excuses to call in sick.

He decided to say he’d dropped a chest of drawers on his hand while moving them and needed to get an x-ray. I said my girlfriend was terribly ill and had to be taken to hospital in the night and I’m still there.

It would have worked if we hadn’t both called the boss from the same landline number in the house 15 minutes apart.’
–Suddendeath777

6.

‘I had to call in sick with a labial haematoma once. They did not believe me. I offered to send pictures as proof. They declined.’
–Hookton

7.

‘Someone phoned in saying they hadn’t made it in for work on time as their brother sneaked into their house and turned all the clocks back by six hours.’
–mrsaxon99

8.

‘A junior lad once called me to ask if he needed to come into the office, because it had snowed a few inches overnight. He thought it would be like a snow day off school, haha. I just explained that as long as conditions weren’t inherently unsafe, then he would be expected to come into work.’
–GotAnyNirnroot

9.

‘Had a girl take the day off because it was a solar eclipse, and she thought it would be the end of the world so wasn’t going to spend it working (she was definitely mad enough to believe this).’
–Oddlyshapedlump

10.

‘I had a phone call from the custody sergeant at the local police station to tell me someone wouldn’t be in because they were currently in a cell.’
–smoulderstoat

11.

‘Lad I worked with turned up late for work as he’d been arrested for burglary on his walk home from the pub the night before and only got released in the morning. It was mistaken identity and he was one of the nicest lads you would ever meet so it was truly absurd.

He’d called the office to explain the situation so we were all aware of it which gave us an amazing opportunity to play Sound Of Da Police when he finally walked in! He took it well!’
–beatsshootsandleaves

12.

‘After some light snowfall overnight someone called in claiming they couldn’t get in because of the snow. I told him the roads were completely clear, he’d have no trouble. He said maybe most of them were, but his street had nearly a foot of the stuff. I remarked how that was strange, because my route goes past his front door and that certainly hadn’t been the case less than ten minutes ago.

He then excused himself to look out the window before expressing his utter shock and amazement at how quickly it had melted, since it had looked like the Arctic tundra when he last looked half an hour previously, and promised to be there in 15 minutes.’
–MrPogoUK