At the Fantastic General Store, we have cold and flu season. You would think we wouldn’t, considering we live among people who claim to be wizards and genius scientists, but they get the common cold just like everyone else. And boy can sickness cause problems for us when it does hit. Has management been nearly wiped out for a couple of days because some kind of sickness swept through us all? Yes. Has the store been in danger of closing early because most of the staff for one shift called out sick? Yes. Is it a pain when someone calls out sick because then the workload increases for other people inside their department as well as outside? Yes. I’m of two minds in this situation. For one, obviously people shouldn’t call out sick unless they actually are sick. But at the same time, there should be enough staff scheduled for each department and each shift, that it doesn’t become a burden if someone genuinely does call off sick. We are humans, not robots. Getting sick is a fact of life, and even robots need down time for maintenance.