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For the past ten years, my columns have appeared
regularly in the Post. You never see those little boxes
which tell you that Ed Quillen is on assignment in Costa
Rica
or Ed Quillen is taking a few days off on
account of visiting relatives
or The flu that's
going around hit, and Ed Quillen was sicker than a dog on
an antifreeze bender on the morning he was supposed to
write this, and as soon as he can get his hands off the
toilet bowl and back on his keyboard, he intends to resume
writing.
You never see those announcements because I'm not an employee with such benefits. I'm am outside contractor. If I don't produce, I don't get paid. I live the way certain Republicans appear to think everybody should live, with the exception of those whose family values consist of trust funds. (If work is ennobling, then why isn't there a 100 percent inheritance tax so that all sectors of society, not merely welfare mothers, get to share in this blessing?)
But this arrangement seems fair enough. It's sure a lot simpler than matters were back when I had a day job editing the local daily.
We did get certain benefits there. For instance, we had paid holidays. We had to work on the holidays, of course, but we did get paid for them. We weren't expected to donate our time on Thanksgiving or Independence Day.
Paid sick leave was another company benefit. I tried to avoid taking it. For one thing, editing a newspaper presents approximately the same physical demands as sitting in an overstuffed chair and operating the TV remote control. If you can breathe, you pass the physical.
If you're going to sit around and feel miserable anyway, why not do it at work, on somebody else's time?
And the publisher was understanding when I explained a
concept gleaned, I think, from the novel Even Cowgirls
Get the Blues.
Therein, a character offered the idea of calling in
well.
We've all run across those sparkling days that
just demand that you get outdoors, days when we feel at the
peak of our powers. Why waste such a day on routine
employment? Why not call in well
and then enjoy such
days to the fullest?
The publisher agreed that I could deploy my unused sick days in that manner, although it couldn't be totally spontaneous -- he wanted a day or two of notice. He figured it was in his interest if I took a scheduled, rather than an unscheduled, day off every now and again.
Scheduling sickness is a matter that shouldn't be left to chance. For instance, my bout with this flu lands at a time when I'm doing end-of-month and end-of-year bookkeeping chores. It is tedious, horrible work, especially since I postponed so much of it during the year (and I made the annual better-bookkeeping New Year's Resolution; fat lot of good it did me).
And so, I really don't mind the aches, sneezes, coughs, agues, chills, bathroom trips -- I'd feel rotten anyway, and why waste health on such toil? If I felt good, I'd start looking in the Constitution for the requirement that every American citizen be an accountant. Given the way that our government treats us, that provision must be in there somewhere.
(Two men were arrested in Nevada last week, charged with
attempting to bomb an IRS office, and Federal agents
gave no motive for the attack ...
Since it would take
about a nanosecond for anyone else to think of a motive,
this lack of ideas about motive must indicate that federal
morale has really slipped during the partial government
shutdown.)
Anyway, I'm coping with this flu. But my younger daughter, 18-year-old Abby, got hit by the flu on Dec. 21 -- the day after school got out for Christmas vacation.
Abby had just purchased a season ski pass to Monarch, and she was eager to take up snowboarding.
But, thanks to the malicious vagaries of viruses, she ended up wasting valuable sick days that should have been applied to school. As she lay around the house sniffling and coughing, Abby acquired three or four days of perfectly excusable absences, and she had to toss them away.
This hardly seems fair, and if we're going to have a decent society, we've got to do something about this terrible inequity.
Given present technology, the easiest solution might be a National Sick Day Bank. On days when you're truly sick, you get a credit, even if it's not a work or school day. If you go to work or school anyway, you get another credits.
And on good days, vibrant days that you don't want to waste on routine work, you could withdraw your credits. No money would be involved -- this system would traffic only in time.
Certainly there are already computers capable of this simple accounting. Fraud is always a possibility, and so investigation would be necessary to insure people were really sick. But so what? Any proposal that involves hiring more cops gets ample political support in this country.
The Sick Day Bank is just a temporary stopgap anyway, until medical technology advances to the point where we can schedule our sickness. My timing was perfect this time around, but suppose the flu hits in September someday?
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