151–160 of 421 posts
The original with ALL of the excuses is at the British Museum here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634
Time off for illness! That's nice. I wonder if one of the HR scribes tracked the days every person took off in an analog ERP system. Scribes seemed important, maybe they outsourced the basics to contractors.
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I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.
I'm sitting on a comfy chair in a climate controlled apartment eating a cheeseburger that someone else made for me and brought to my house, while a machine washes my clothes and I read some discussion on the Internet during a paid lunch break. I'll take this over manual labor any day, even if someone else is getting richer than me.
I don't get why some missed work for "wife bleeding"?
sauce:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_and_menstruation#By_re...
Pop-up Blocked by OpenCulture’s own Pop-Up JavaScript. Running Firefox on iOS in portrait mode. Turning phone around to landscape still rendered me unable to press any button much less read the pop up. Only got words like “ad-blocker”. Nope, not running any ad-blocker.
Doesn't mobile Firefox have built-in adblocking?
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I dunno, you probably get some sort of bereavement time off. Also, personal death care involving families seems to be creeping back somewhat.
When my mother passed away, I had just moved across country to start a new job just 6 months earlier. Even though I was still such a new employee, they allowed for paid time off to handle things for much longer than I would have expected. I was shocked and very appreciative of that. My previous employer would never have considered something like that which was one of the many reasons I left.
I used to live in a scorpion-rich environment and can attest that a sting should disqualify one from manual labor for a day. I found that every time I was stung though the effects were less and less. The last time I was stung was a minor nuisance at most. I would advise, if you find yourself living with scorpions, to check your shoes, by shaking them out, before putting them on.
I second the shoe-shaking ritual. Even if you keep your shoes inside. When I lived in the desert, the neighbor had work done in his yard, and every scorpion from his property moved into mine. One day I found the cat eating a scorpion in the living room. Rushed him to the emergency cat vet place, and was told that cats aren't bothered by scorpions or their stings. But don't make crunchy, meaty scorpions part of a regu…
Anyway, the veterinarian told us that cats are generally so fast to notice and slap the shit out of scorpions that they kill scorpions...without being stung.
One of our feline family members got stung and let out a big OWWWWWW then was licking her paw for quite some time, and this was a bark scorpion. Other times she's slapped them to squish them.
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Interesting that the dates are "Month 3 of Summer, Day 24" etc. The curious bit to me being the enduring use of 4 distinct seasons, when there are obviously other ways to mark a year. Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?
I once heard Canadians in Winnipeg joke there were but two seasons, Winter and Construction. I think this was in reference to road maintenance. In NZ these days I feel like we have two: Drought and Mudslide.
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Interesting that the dates are "Month 3 of Summer, Day 24" etc. The curious bit to me being the enduring use of 4 distinct seasons, when there are obviously other ways to mark a year. Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?
It's common among many ancient cultures to treat equinoxes and solstices as events of great importance, as those mark the beginning of the season change, but not all regions experience seasons the same. Ancient Egyptians, while knowledgeable of astronomy, had only three seasons: Akhet (summer/heat), Peret (flooding, of the Nile) and Shemu (harvest). Notice the conspicuous absence of winter. https://egyptianstreets.co…
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“… On month 3 of Akhet, days 21-4, it seems that Pennub was off work because he was looking after the ill Aapehti. The most frequently recorded reason for absence is illness (over a hundred times), including 'eye trouble', and 'the scorpion stung him'; the next most frequent is being away with one's superior doing private work for him, a practice that was not forbidden if done in moderation…”
At the beginning of 'Inscription position: front', it looks like it was not done in moderation