Just got a really good job where they don’t have sick days but instead you can just call out sick whenever “on the honor system.” I want to take advantage of this but also don’t want to do it in a way that’s excessive or draws attention. So how many times would you say you call out sick per year/what seems like a believable amount of times to get sick?
Not as much as some of my annoying ass coworkers do, that’s for sure.
Glancing quickly at my timeclock app, I took 23 days of time off in 2025. Most of that was PTO (because we have unlimited PTO/Sick and I am too lazy to really mark them properly).
For example, at least 6 of those days are legitimate ‘sick’ days according to our employee handbook (because they were days I requested off for doctors appointments & our company counts those automatically as ‘sick’ days even if it is just me requesting the whole day off because I could only get a dentist appointment at 2pm on a Friday and I didn’t feel like clocking in & working a half day)
I don’t think that’s an insane amount of sick/pto to take, given that back in like 2019 when we didn’t have unlimited PTO/Sick, we got 20 sick days a year and earned like 7 hours of PTO a pay period. I have a pair of married coworkers who will request off 2 weeks for Christmas/NYE, which is part of our busiest time of the year, and then request another 2 weeks off during Memorial Day, and will frequently just call in sick on random days & they get away with it.
It is really, Kmart said, how much of an issue it makes for the rest of the team. One could argue that a lot of my coworkers take advantage of the fact that they are technically siloed into their own duties/roles, so them taking a week off every 2-3 months isn’t really the end of the world. (I don’t agree with this because I am always picking up the slack when we’re missing 3-4 people on the same day)
From what I understand which is not a reliable metric, the amount of headache your absence causes and how much visibility it has matters much more than the number. That’s what gets people to notice or chatter respectively. Nobody wants to do your work nor get flak from higher up.
But you should of course always avoid getting others sick as much as you can because that’s prime directive level cringe. So you might paint yourself into a corner indulging and then actually being sick.