At the Fantastic General Store, it isn’t fun when one of your coworkers calls off sick. It means more work for you and the rest of the employees who come in that day. But it’s also not fun calling in sick yourself. You already don’t feel good, and depending on how sick you feel, you may start trying to gauge whether you can tough it out through your shift, or if you should just give up and use some of your leave if you have it. When you inevitably do decide you aren’t going into work, calling can be a pain as well. Getting ahold of a manager is harder than you would think, since they are sometimes busy themselves, and you don’t want to just leave things to chance by telling your coworker you aren’t coming in. You can’t always trust the wishing well or the cute animal sidekick to pass along your message either. In some cases, you have to talk to a manager in order for the leave to stick, and you may have to call a certain number of hours before your shift starts in order to not get in trouble. I suggest managers have answering machines, so employees can leave messages for those times when the manager isn’t by their phone. That way, the odds are better the employee calls out an acceptable amount of time before their shift starts, and the message still gets through to the people who need to know.