BadNick

I might call in sick a couple days a year at the most. Luckily, I'm sort of mostly healthy, at least as far as I know and feel.

Our company doesn't give "sick", "vacation", "personal" days anymore like we used to. In the last couple years we changed to getting a block of PTO "personal time off" days and you can use them for whatever you need. How many depends on how long somebody's been on the job. I think we give a week after 6 months and then after a year you get 2 weeks, and then it builds from there. I've been there 15 years so I get so many I don't know what to do with them. As of now, I have the week leading into Christmas scheduled off right up until after New Year and I still have to burn up 3 more weeks in addition to that.

It's a small company with quite good personnel policies so in the rare case where somebody really gets sick and doesn't have days, we would evaluate that on a case by case basis but almost always give the employee the time off they need. We just added a "use it or loose it" policy which doesn't allow carrying PTO's over into the next year, but you can cash out 5 PTO days for pay if you choose to and have them left at the end of the year.

This reminds me that even during my school years, many years went by without me being out sick. I'm grateful for that health and luck.