36 Workers Reveal The Strangest Excuses People Have Given To Call Off Work

Not me, but my boyfriend. He had a coworker who’d call in sick a lot and have even more days where he had to leave work early.

My favorite reason he gave for calling in sick was that he had a pointy toe. I have no idea what it meant, but he was apparently fine the next day.

As for the half-days, there was one year where this coworker had to leave early because it was his dad’s birthday and he wanted to visit his dad early to avoid meeting his siblings, who apparently had some drama going on. This happened, mind you, three or four times that year.

Not super unusual, but I had a guy call off because he “had a lot of errands to run.” I couldn’t even be mad—I was so caught off guard by his honesty. But I told him next time, maybe just throw a cough in there and say he’s not feeling well instead.

Another time, I had a guy call off because his dog was sick. Not that unusual—I’m a pet owner, so I get it.

What made it unusual were the three messages he left after that, going into graphic detail about his dog’s post-surgery complications. I know way more about Cupcake’s genitals than I ever wanted to know. Ever.

I had an a**e clown email me saying she couldn’t come to work because she was locked in her apartment. When she went to open the door, the doorknob came off. I called and asked her to show me, so she videos herself putting the doorknob back on and opening the door… and the door had a deadlock, so the handle was irrelevant.

One lady rang in to say she couldn’t come in due to “women’s problems.” No further explanation was offered, and the male boss was too embarrassed to ask for details.

I went to Montreal for the weekend, and now it hurts when I pee…

I work for an environmental consulting company. We had a paid summer intern who was likely still in college at the time. His job was to go out with the boss to help with field work each day. The kid called off because his chinchilla fell into the toilet and got wet. He had to take it to the vet to get it taken care of—or something like that.

Ooh, ooh! A guy who reported to me told me his grandma passed and he wouldn’t be at work on Friday to travel to the funeral. The conversation with the entire team at roll call went like this:

Colleague: “Boss, I won’t be in on Friday, grandma died and I need to travel.”
Me: “Condolences, sorry to hear—but didn’t both your grandmas pass away last year?”
Colleague: “Eish, ya boss, you know… my forefathers, ya, they each had a mother.”

Only in South Africa.

I had a coworker who didn’t show up to work for a week. She called in and told the boss she was sorry, but she had been in the hospital and couldn’t call before then. Sounds reasonable, right? But this woman was known for lying about anything and everything. I told someone that I didn’t believe her. They called the hospital and asked—nope, never heard of her.

They called her back and asked why she lied, and instead of coming clean, she doubled down and said she “signed herself in using her mother’s health care card,” which you cannot do in the country I live in—it would be fraud. After calling the hospital to double-check that it wasn’t true (not sure why they bothered), they called her back and she finally confessed to being on a bender with her boyfriend and just didn’t feel like coming in or calling out.

I still shake my head at the fact that they didn’t fire her for that.

My colleague didn’t show up for work one morning. No contact from him. The next day, no show again, still no contact. A few days later, we started to worry and tried to call his mobile—no answer. We tried to contact his housemates, but no one really knew where he lived.

Three weeks later, he finally called in. The supervisor was surprised to hear from him, but nobody expected his next words: “So I was in prison up in the North. Do I still have a job or what?” It went through HR, but he resigned before any conclusion was reached.

For clarity—this was in Ireland; “up North” refers to Northern Ireland. He had some previous driving offenses. He went on a trip with friends who rented a car. He drove, crashed, and was under the influence. Luckily, no one was seriously harmed.

I had a coworker who was notorious for calling in. It was always something like, “I have to take my cat to the vet,” or the like. My favorite was, “I can’t come in because my wife has a yeast infection.” LOL

I had one job where we had to give a reason for calling off. However, my union argued and won that if we had the time, our sick leave had to be accepted.

I would call off and tell management I broke my arm or back. When I told them I couldn’t come in because I had explosive diarrhea, management asked me not to give reasons anymore.

We had a team meeting—everyone was in the room except one guy. We were waiting, and the manager decided to give him a call.

The guy picks up, and the manager asks, “Where are you?”
A normal person would say, “Got stuck in traffic,” the usual.
This guy? He goes, “I’m at the bookies across the street.”

The manager had the phone on speaker, so everyone heard and burst out laughing. He wasn’t even scolded, as the manager asked him for some particular games’ odds.

I have two stories.

First, when I was discharged from the Army, I got a job at a lumber company as a delivery driver. One of the yard guys was a “topper”—anything you said you had done or knew, he had done or knew something better. One day, we got a large sheetrock (wallboard) order for delivery in the afternoon. He was next in line to be a helper (it had to be hand-carried into the house), and the load was assigned to me. I got the truck loaded, and we agreed to head out after lunch. Ten minutes before meet-up time, he called and claimed he couldn’t go because he had just backed over his dog in the driveway. I took a different guy, and we ended up splitting a very generous tip.

Years later, as a manager, a driver called me on a Wednesday morning to say he would be sick on Sunday night. It turned out his father had watched the Weather Channel and saw that there was a possibility of snow that day.

A friend of mine had a large mirror beside his side of the bed. One day, his wife moved the mirror, and he didn’t notice when he went to bed. He didn’t go to work the next day. His excuse to his boss: “I woke up and didn’t see myself in the mirror, so I thought I had already gone to work.”

The boss laughed.

I worked with a woman who had a host of phobias. One of them was that she wouldn’t drive in the rain. If she went home for lunch, she wouldn’t come back until it stopped raining—even if that meant the entire day. For reasons I’ll never understand, they put up with it.

2020 election: a dude left work because he was stressed about the Georgia recount. He took the whole next day off too!