181–190 of 203 posts
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One of these things is not like the others. People should be able to control talking (assuming they know it bothers the people around them).
People should be able to control all of them, at least for timespans of a few seconds.
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Expecting that people should control their sneezes is a ridiculous cultural norm.
Expecting sick people to not fill a room with hundreds of millions of aerosolized particles when that could be clearly avoided is a result of simple respect for those around you and evidence of manners and good breeding. Cover your sneeze. Cover your cough. Stay home when sick. These are kindergarten-level cultural learnings.
The dilemma between
- your livelihood & potential (costly) treatment
- absence without sick pay
goes beyond kindergarten-level because kindergarteners really don't have much to lose.
Staying at home when you are sick, from the employer's perspective, should be vastly preferable. Even if the employer were totally heartless about people's health and only cared about money, it's a risk avoidance strategy that pays for itself many times over by reducing the chance the business collapses. They lose a negligible amount of productivity to reduce the risk they lose a significant amount of productivity. And yet, there are many employers who will hold you in contempt for asking they institute sick leave -- even if it's the only reasonable way to deal with the reality that people transfer sickness but also need to eat.
Sick people act rationally when looking out for their own livelihood's continued existence. I agree it's definitely good to hope to gain recognition for your displays of respect towards your employer/coworkers. But if your employer/coworkers do not respect that you have jeopardized your livelihood for their benefit, the continued and self-inflicted cost is pretty much a total refutation of "good breeding", cultural learnings, or understanding what manners are for.
And then, beyond the 1st-order consequences, there are 2nd-order (immunity/interpersonal/office politics) consequences of the decision to prevent people from coming into contact with all pathogens, if the primary aim is only to reduce the risk of extremely harmful pathogens (but those aren't particularly relevant to the discussion of individual decision-making).
[0] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/benefits-leave/sickleave
PSA of the day: With practice you can learn to delay your sneeze by a second or two. That gives you time exhale all the air from your lungs so the sneeze has minimal power[1]. Tilt your head down too and with further practice you can learn to open your throat in order to minimize air velocity. [1] Source: me, a former obnoxiously loud sneezer that always dismissed it as an unavoidable and comical physiological quirk…
Since my sneezing is super loud I am looking forward to trying this technique soon! Thanks for sharing
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I think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely). So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PT…
Why on earth are sick days included in your paid time off? If you're sick, you're sick? I assume you're in the USA, given that barbaric policy?
Now you must spend your own time recovering from illness that your employer was the primary cause of. That's brilliant right there. U-freakin-S-A.
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This fits with my experience. My department has some cubicle farms and some shared but much more private office suites. The cube farm people are always getting sick. Somebody comes in with a cough and promptly spreads it. It then can take weeks before there's a week without somebody sick. Getting people to stay home when they are sick has been harder to implement than you'd think. I've tried with my work team. A numb…
Ever since companies ditched vacation and sick leave in favor of combined PTO, I work while sick. When I had sick leave, I used it. It may well be that they don't want to cut their July vacation short by a day because they caught a cold in January. And to compound the issue, it was probably a cold they caught at work, because the company leave policy reinforces the behavior. People who stay home when sick are punishe…
In this particular case though, possibly just how lucky I am to live in Australia. Here it's either just common practice at most companies, or possibly required by law, but everywhere I've seen the leave policies provides 52 weeks a year of sick/carers leave.
Usually this is broken up into ~20 days of leave where one isn't really required to provide any justification beyond "I felt bad that day" and beyond that a doctors certificate may be required.
But that's always entirely separate to annual leave.
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> Cover your sneeze. Cover your cough. Stay home when sick. These are kindergarten-level cultural learnings. A friend/colleague of mine is suffering from Chronic sinusitis and she usually sneezes every morning for around 20-30 times (random number, I know!) over period of few hours. The 'sneezing fit' is 100% of the time non-contagious yet loud and 'full with watery substance', She covers her sneezing most of the tim…
Be realistic. We're talking about the 99.9% of other people who don't have that condition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/health/transgender-popula...
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Ever since companies ditched vacation and sick leave in favor of combined PTO, I work while sick. When I had sick leave, I used it. It may well be that they don't want to cut their July vacation short by a day because they caught a cold in January. And to compound the issue, it was probably a cold they caught at work, because the company leave policy reinforces the behavior. People who stay home when sick are punishe…
It's smallish things like this which make me realise how lucky I am not to live in America. In this particular case though, possibly just how lucky I am to live in Australia. Here it's either just common practice at most companies, or possibly required by law, but everywhere I've seen the leave policies provides 52 weeks a year of sick/carers leave. Usually this is broken up into ~20 days of leave where one isn't rea…
I read this and go '52 weeks a year for sick leave? Aren't there 52 weeks in a year total?'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expecting that people should control their sneezes is a ridiculous cultural norm.
Expecting sick people to not fill a room with hundreds of millions of aerosolized particles when that could be clearly avoided is a result of simple respect for those around you and evidence of manners and good breeding. Cover your sneeze. Cover your cough. Stay home when sick. These are kindergarten-level cultural learnings.
For years, my dad had 4 days off a year. That was both vacation and sick time. Any other time missed was time he wasn't getting paid for.
People who read HN probably don't know what that's like for the most part, especially if you offer opinions like yours. You might have learned that in kindergarten but sometimes you gotta eat, too. Especially when others are depending on you.