Fast food employee calls in sick 5 times in their first 4 months, manager calls them out: ‘He was trying to guilt trip me for following health codes’

Calling in sick is a delicate balance.

It’s tough that we live in a world where you have to be careful about how many times you call out sick from work. You can’t control illness, and sometimes you just fall prey to it. In an ideal world, you should be able to stay home from work whenever you don’t feel well and need a rest. But that’s not the world that we live in, unfortunately. Especially in areas of work like food service, calling out sick is a pretty big taboo. It’s a little ironic because in high-contact jobs like that, you have much more chance of making somebody else sick if you show up to work ill, but you also face bigger consequences when you don’t come in. You face consequences in your own life because you’re losing out on hours of wages, but you’re also potentially putting your job at risk if you call out too many times in a short period of time. Restaurants in fast food chains rely on people to be there every day. They usually run on pretty tight margins, so they want people to show up when they need them. If you’re not a reliable kind of person, then you might end up with your job at risk even if it was as innocent as actually being sick.