What’s your MOST INNOVATIVE Excuse for Shirking Work?

There was a time in my career when I would sometimes wake up & feel like not going to work. More often than not, I would call up office and report ‘sick’. Sometimes, I would report my near and dear ones sick. However, never would I venture to go beyond that reason. So, it has always amazed me whenever I see people who are lazy, plain and simple, come up with innovative reasons for avoiding work. They are not the sorts who occasionally stay away from work – but actually thrive at avoiding work, shirking duty or evading responsibility - almost as if by habit.

I later discovered that in my case it was actually that I wasn’t enjoying my work anymore. Since there was no point in carrying on when one is not into his job fully, I had called it quits and moved on. But, what of those who are compulsive fakers, shirkers, avoiders – I keep wondering!

Let me list out a few of the outlandish excuses I have either seen, heard, experienced, read or come across:

- In India, if it is election time government officials would be found shirking duty on the pretext of being “busy with elections”. Not that they work diligently otherwise but that’s another issue!

- A grouse commonly heard from people about Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan is that they take recourse to religious rituals in order to shirk work.

- And then there are employees who get themselves certified as mentally disabled in order to shirk work. This is because for someone with say, an Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), lapses in concentration and/or drop in productivity are allowable traits!

- Coming back to India, cricket can play spoilsport with children as well as adults here. If kids blame the game for inadequate preparation during examination time, adults are always on the look-out for a pretext to bunk work and catch a match, live!

Now, let me recreate situations wherein the person looking for an excuse is trying out innovative ways to do so:

· You are on duty and you plant someone to make a call and announce an emergency situation to you. You manage to get the permission to leave office the moment you get the call. I remember an incident when a colleague of mine left the workplace abruptly after getting one such emergency call (his child had gone ‘missing’ from school). The next day at work he told us that his son was traced to a ‘friend’s place’ after hours of frantic searching!! Was the ‘friend’ in question the same person who made that emergency phone call a day before, we were left wondering!

· Your office accepts leave of absence from only those who are ill. You cannot call in sick as you’ve done that way too often recently. You report to work, take Epicat by the spoon-full, induce nausea, go ahead and vomit into the trash can by the side of your work-desk. And you get the permission to head home immediately after that!

· A stranger shows up at your workplace. You talk to him/her privately and are seen crying. You not only have a great reason to leave on ‘personal’ grounds but also get a shoulder to cry on, reserved for you for the near future!

· ‘Tis the season of swine flu. How about getting afflicted with the disease? If so, you’ve a sure-shot way of getting long leave granted, no questions asked. (I had a colleague who was planning a job change and feigned ‘chikungunya’ during the time when the epidemic was creating havoc in India. He got a 45 day leave sanctioned and actually put in his papers upon reporting back to work.

But the most creative of all the reasons has got to be something I stumbled upon recently +in a Dilbert comic. It’s called ‘Preemptive Guilt’ and to know what it’s all about you will need to check the cartoon I’ve posted with this report.

The mother of all excuses for shirking work successfully and getting away with it on a regular basis are still those innocuous looking meetings we spend our time on everyday at office. Meetings are a great way to simply while away precious time. Shunning the ubiquitous meetings would put paid to a potential productivity killer.

Organizations need to put in place systems that do not provide employees with idle periods of work. Tying up those loose ends of software, minimizing those unplanned power outages, clamping down on virus infections – these things might look trivial to the eye but actually can prove to be giant productivity boosters in the long run. "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean!" is a motto which McDonalds preaches. When employees practise it, the results are there for all to see.

Remember, it could be something as innocuous as calling in to report sick to the workplace but if it becomes a habit it has probably turned into an excuse for work avoidance or even a disciplinary issue that needs to be sorted out on priority.

- myVox