Get your pets spayed and neutered, people (redux)

I know I've blogged somewhere down there about The Price is Right, but here I am doing it again. Just bear with me. And if you're one of my co-workers, and you think this blog post is going to be about the time last week in Arizona when I had to go swimming with my boss in a pool owned by someone named Bob Barker (not the actual game show host) -- think again. I would never.

Nope. This blog post is about last Monday, when I took my first ever for realz sick day from work.

I know what you're thinking - you're thinking, but A.B., you've been working for a million years at so many jobs -- how can this be? But it's really true. All the jobs I had between undergrad round 1 and underground round 2 that afforded me sick days made it truly impossible to actually take them. They were the sorts of employment situations in which very few people could replace you, especially last-minute, and you were absolutely integral to things not falling to bits. It was Really Frowned Upon to call out, and generally so doing would mean begging a coworker to cover for you and then owing them tenfold in shifts later on. These were the sorts of jobs that on paper were forty hours per week but really ended up being sixty, and so time off was sacred. Calling in sick meant disrupting someone else's sacred time. It was a real problem.

And then when I was putting myself through college, I had two hourly jobs. Calling in sick would disrupt the very delicate balance of barely being out of debt and being in debt. It was all very complicated, and so I always went to work even when I felt like total ass.

Now, however, I have a real(ish) job with a lovely boss at which I am not expected to show up if I don't feel well unless something really and truly dire is going on. I had no idea what to make of this, and so Monday when I woke up after my Sunday evening "I'm in denial about my scratchy throat" South Philly water ice [look it up, non-Philly people] crawl and felt even worse, I definitely lay in bed for about an hour willing myself to get up and get in the shower and drag myself to my desk. I had the same debate an hour before about bagging on my morning run, but I felt certain that I would make it to my job. But at some point I surrendered, and left an all-too-long and over-explain-y voice mail for my boss, and then a worse one for the department administrator, about how awful I felt. And then I went back to sleep.

It was amazing.

Around 11 I woke up and really needed to watch an episode of The Price  is Right, like the good old days of middle school mornings spent home sick. I was hoping to turn up some 1980s episodes with Bob Barker, but the internet did not provide. Instead I watched a recent one on CBS with Drew Carey as host. I was pleased to find that he threw out the same Barker tagline at the end about spaying and neurering your pets, though it didn't have the same je-ne-sais-quoi that Bob's got. It's also worth pointing out that the Price is Right mystique that I recall from childhood - aka "How the hell do they know how much this shit is worth?!" was not solved by my graceful entry into legitimate adulthood. Put a six egg boiler or a steam shower or a speedboat or a vacation to Hawai'i or some Fiestaware in front of me, and I still can't tell you if it costs $5 or $5,000. They need some sort of secondhand store version of this show. At that I'd be a champion.

FWIW, I'm on the mend now. And that sick day sure helped. Thanks, my job.