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From: Sloan Buchan-McGilliard
Subject: I’m not feeling so well…
Date: February 27, 2007 3:11:58 PM EST
To: Adam White
I forgot my phone at home today. In case you tried to call me. I'm also going rock climbing right from work. I'll call you after.
Sloan Buchan-McGilliard
Sales Engineer, Transducers & Pulser/Receivers
That email doesn’t make any sense.
A Or does it?
It doesn’t. Why would Sloan tell you he wasn’t feeling so well, but then also tell you he was going rock climbing? Shouldn’t he be going home to rest and drink Echinacea tea?
A He should.
And what are Pulser/Receivers?
A Nobody knows.
So why would a sick person go rock climbing?
A Maybe the person’s not really sick.
Oh.
A Maybe the person is planning to be sick the next day (wink-wink) so he can skip work and go snowboarding.
Ohhhhh. Or maybe he really is sick…sick at snowboarding!
A Dude. Just stick to asking questions.
On Wednesday, I had a day off from work, Sloan took a sick day, we went to Killington, he snowboarded, I skied, the conditions were perfect – it was 35 degrees, good snow, sunny – and Sloan accidentally stole himself a snowboard.
Actually, he rented a board, and in the morning, before our first run, but after he’d already visited the rental center, I asked him what kind of board they gave him. He said he hadn’t even looked. We rode the gondola to the top of the mountain (Sloan’s first time! (He got motion sickness)), Sloan strapped on his board, and said, “That’s weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“I think they set up this board wrong. It’s for someone who rides goofy.”
Someone who rides goofy is someone who rides with their right foot forward instead of their left. I didn’t think much of it, but later in the day I passed Sloan on a catwalk and noticed that there was definitely more room in front of his front foot than behind his back foot. It’s not supposed to be like that.
At the end of the day Sloan returned his board to the rental shop, and the rental guy said, “What can I do for you?”
And Sloan said, “I’m done.”
The rental guy: “Cool. So what can I do for you?”
Sloan: “I’d like to return your board.”
“That’s not our board.”
“Oh.”
“You better bring that back to where you took it from.”
“I’ve been riding it all day.”
The board Sloan had stolen looked completely different, wasn’t nearly as nice, and was arranged totally backwards from the rental board. We can learn two things from this incident:
Sloan should look at things more carefully when he rents them. (I’ve been trying to come up with the rental car equivalent of unintentionally swapping your snowboard for an inferior goofy board that looks nothing like your own, and I’ve decided you would have to rent a black H2 truck, but instead drive away in a yellow Subaru Baja that was built with the steering wheel on the wrong side.)
It is always worth it to take a sick day and go skiing.
If we take the lessons learned from our sick day, unfold and expand them like origami dragonfly wings, and then let that dragonfly bat its wings, thereby forcing a giraffe in New Jersey to sneeze, instigating a stampede, which forms a tornado that sweeps over the entire country, we see a national problem: Americans don’t take enough sick days. It’s not that we work too hard – because we don’t. We just work too much. There’s a difference.
Take, for example, the construction crew that’s been digging a hole in the road between my apartment and my workplace for the past four months. There are usually four guys in hardhats there, and they all have a job. One guy smokes, one guy drinks coffee, one guy gives the thumbs up to passing cars, and the fourth guy operates a jackhammer, or leans on a shovel, or lights the first guy’s cigarette. Sometimes four additional guys show up, stand on the other side of the street, and wear sandwich boards that accuse the first four of being scabs. They are all working too much – showing up to work way too early, way too often – but (obviously) not too hard.
Life is short, but it’s also awesome, so we should get out and enjoy it instead of sitting at a desk playing computer solitaire or drinking coffee at an intersection while our buddy drills a hole in the street.
Won’t this be bad for the economy?
A I don’t know. I’m not an economist.
I’m a freakonomist!
A You’ve gotta stop writing your own jokes.
No, I am not an accredited economist, but I think I understand why industrious workers would be beneficial for the American financial landscape. Here’s my hypothesis though: if we create more efficient workers, who take longer vacations and spend more money, that would be good, too, right?*
I have developed a two-pronged pitchfork of a plan to help Americans take more time off while still boosting the economy:
Part one: stop paying overtime. Pay undertime. Reward workers who get their work done with hours to spare, let them take a longer weekend, and give them bonus cash to spend on shoes, video games, or strippers. Penalize workers who keep the company’s electricity pumping late into the night by decreasing their hourly wage when it hits overtime or strapping them into their swivel chair and spinning it until they get dizzy and vomit in their lap.
Part two: take a page from Europeans and elected officials and spend more time vacationing. Let’s Velcro on our Tevas, clip on our fanny packs, head to our ranches in Texas, and go hunting for old men. Or we could go mountain biking or something. Whatever. It doesn’t matter what we do, so long as we’re not working.
Here’s a chart that shows how more efficient workers and increased leisure time will make the economy go up:
But you know what’s more important than stroking the economy? Happiness. Jack Nicholson once said, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” and that was right before he tried to kill his wife and son with an axe, so it’s important to relax sometimes.
I’m not so naïve as to think this column will change the way Americans work or take vacations. But we do have sick days. Let’s use them. And if you need excuses to give your boss, here are a few that will work every time:
- “My earlobe fell off. That’s why I can’t even hear what you’re saying right now. What? I can’t hear you. Look, I have to find my ear, okay? I’ll be in tomorrow hopefully.”
- “Do you even know what gingivitis is?”
- “A wolf ate my BlackBerry and then my foot. What? I have no idea how my BlackBerry number is showing up on your BlackBerry. That’s what’s so weird about this whole thing.”
- “I read a fortune cookie last night that said, ‘I wouldn’t go outside tomorrow if I were you.’ Plus, I think there was something wrong with the Chinese food because I’ve been pooping my brains out every fifteen minutes.”
- “A rocket landed in my village early this morning – No, no, it didn’t explode. Everyone’s fine. It’s just a weird situation right now, and I feel like I should stay in.”
If you’re not comfortable lying, just say you’re sick. Keep it vague. And then if anyone calls you a liar, say, “I’m not a liar. I really am sick… sick at snowboarding!”
*Is this how communism started? If it is – whoops!
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