Sneezin's Greetings

(Now come on – you know I was overdue for a really bad pun.)

CNN reported today on workers taking sick time when they aren’t really sick in an effort to catch up on holiday shopping or other year-end kind of stuff like that. I’ve found the tone of these reports lately to be much more along the lines of “maintaining work-life balance” and trying to squeeze in “family time” whenever possible, which is immensely important as we know (though far be it for me to encourage sloth).

Now if a story like this had been reported by The Wall Street Journal or U.S. News and World Report, the emphasis would have been on lost man (person?) hours, perceived decreases in productivity, hurting the domestic gross national product, and generally how lazy Americans who are lagging behind the world in math and science are generally causing seismic shifts in the earth’s axis, leading to our eventual destruction.

With this is mind, I should note that there is enough documentation out there pointing out that we Americans need to take more vacation time. As Mark Ames notes here (and I hope some of his remarks are merely tongue-in-cheek):

According to Expedia, American workers save their employees some $21 billion per year by not taking even the meagre vacation time they're allowed.

And yes, I’m lumping vacation time together with sick time, and that’s definitely not the same thing, but it is a bit because it’s time not spent working of course.

So if you’ll excuse me (cough), I’m (cough, cough, hack, cough) going to cut out a bit early (hack, spit) since I’m a bit (cough) under the weather (and no, it has nothing to do with that half-price sale at Eddie Bauer :- ).