Just ask for leave

There are days when all of us feel like bunking office. As Delhi slowly simmers, it requires a steely resolve even for the most motivated among us to haul ourselves out of air-conditioned comfort and get to work. If you happen to be working with a young team, you’ll find a mind-bogglingly hilarious range of excuses that twentysomethings can come up with to avoid work. I suppose they could be true but I have a hard time keeping a straight face and expressing sympathy.

Like recently, a 21-year-old on my team told me her sister’s husband got hit by a golf ball in the eye and has gone partially blind. So, of course, she couldn’t make it to work. One reporter weirdly enough had a nerve problem only in her right hand, so she couldn’t type for weeks on end. Another had some mysterious illness stalking her family. In my opinion, the simplest excuses work the best. Like when a reporter told me she didn’t have electricity all night and was too spaced out to put in a hard day’s work. That, I definitely believe.

However, most of us have had incorrigible bosses at some stage and we’ve been forced to lie to get leave. At my previous job when I was desperate for some time off and my leave wasn’t getting sanctioned, I succumbed to killing off a grandparent as well. I might have felt the tiniest pang of guilt, but logic prevailed: he was dead anyway. My husband, a lot more God-fearing and superstitious than I am, was appalled. My other set of grandparents, very much alive even now, had a hearty chuckle. But the last laugh was eventually on me. After a sunny week by the beach in Goa, I came back to Delhi and had a nasty bout of malaria. Then I totalled my car and narrowly escaped with my life. A week later, I broke my ankle. All the while I had to put up with my husband’s infuriating smirk and murmurs about poetic justice.

Logic and common sense, indeed! I’m convinced somebody up there was trying to teach me a lesson. Now, if I want leave, I offer no excuses. I simply ask for it.