It's cold outside...

[lnr]

I have a cold. On Monday I was very bunged up, with a sore throat and feeling grim. On Tuesday I was snotty, blowing my nose every five minutes. Today I'm a bit less runny-nosed but coughing. I've had a mild headache on and off all week, and I'm knackered.

I don't have a fever and it's certainly not the flu. I get the impression quite a few people would go into work in this state: "it's only a cold". What do you think? [Poll #1287169]

Comments

[natural20.livejournal.com]

I think my issue here is that I'm really not sure what constitutes "full of cold." I don't tend to get such things very often, but I tend to try and gauge how likely I am to infect others who may suffer more from such an illness. Hence be not answering the yes/no questions in your poll, sorry. But if I was really bad I'd stay at home and definitely prefer others did.

[indigo-violet.livejournal.com]

If someone's feeling really really flaky then yes they ought to stay at home. If I get ill I know when I'm together enough to drag myself in or whether I need my R&R.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Depends on the fullness of cold, as it were, and the nature of work. For me today is unquestionably a stay-at-home day (got up at 4.50am because of uncontrollable coughing, can't breathe without audible wheezing, snot of unmentionable quality/quantity, fever); I'd be pretty livid if an office-mate came in in this state. Someone who does not commute on public transport and does not share an office with anyone? Their call, although I'd be happier if they took a packed lunch too and stayed away from the rest of us. Sharing germs is not a nice thing to do.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Spreading germs is antisocial. But work needs doing. Work from home if you feel up to it? That's what I do, anyway.

[megamole.livejournal.com]

I think the issue is infectiousness. If you're likely to pass it on to your colleagues, work loses [n] colleagues rather than 1.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

It depends entirely on the amount of cold. From what you describe, I'd go in, but it wouldn't take being that much worse to stay home.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Like Becky, I would probably work from home if I was well enough, but if I was really stuffed up I'd just take a sick day or two. More important when you inevitably end up with a chest infection for 2 weeks after. D:

[ali-in-london.livejournal.com]

To be brutal, the person in question probably shouldn't have gone in on Tuesday.

The way I see it, there are three reasons for you to not go in when you're ill:

1) You'll be too ill to get anything done, or any work you do get done will be of a very low quality
2) While at home you can wrap yourself up in a duvet and have complete access to all sorts of treatments and palliatives
3) The rest will mean you get better faster

Employers and colleagues care about the third reason, but they also have another two:

4) Ewww, we don't want to get what you've got!
5) Also, you sound gross. Please stop coughing/sniffing/sneezing every 10 seconds.


Of course, all the above is based on the assumption that we're talking about an otherwise relatively healthy person who isn't getting ill every other week.

[pm215]

I tend to think of colds as 'inevitabilities you just put up with'; my experience is that they're usually fairly mild. If I'm going to feel a bit urgh then it doesn't matter to me much whether I'm at work or not. (I did get a really nasty cold last year, and I took a day or two off for that, but that was obviously much worse than the run of the mill cold.)

I think I picked up this attitude to colds as a child. My mother was fairly strict about what would allow you a day off school, and a cold definitely didn't count.

t we need is for Emperor to run a network simulation to tell us what % of people need to stay home when they have a moderate cold for it to have any effect on the spread of the cold through the population...

[venta.livejournal.com]

I tend to worry more about whether or not I feel well enough to work/whether I'd get stuff done rather than whether I'll be spreading germs. I'm never quite sure how easy it is to pass colds on, anyway, unless you're in very close proximity to your colleagues. Certainly I always seem to generate my own colds, I don't seem to catch other people's.

A fortnight ago I took some time off work with a cold, but I didn't actually feel all that ill. It was just that my nose was running - quite literally - continuously, which meant that I always needed one hand busy with a tissue. This made typing (or concentrating) pretty difficult, so I just gave up and went back to bed.

Working-from-home is pretty much the ideal option if that's available to you.

[simont]

Having voted "stay at home", I actually did continue coming to work with a cold the other week. But that was due to stupidity: I didn't realise why I was feeling so grotty until I was already there...

[perdita-fysh.livejournal.com]

You didn't have an option for what I do where I can - I work from home. I only don't work if I'm horribly ill because if I don't work I don't get paid; but I do try to keep my germs to myself if I'm contagious and work from home for something like a cold.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Please stop coughing/sniffing/sneezing every 10 seconds.

Yes. That.

[lnr]

Oh I've been home all three days. For exactly the reasons you give.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Depends on how bad I'm feeling and how much work I have to do. BTW, get well soon!

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

I take it easy when I have a cold, following an incident in 2003 when I didn't properly recover from a cold, resumed cycling to work daily, and promptly fell over (a few weeks later) with tonsillitis.

[monkeyhands.livejournal.com]

For all of my employed jobs (as opposed to my freelance jobs), the office culture has been about presenteeism rather than productivity. For a lot of them, my actual work was either ill-defined or pointless or impossible or metaphorically torn up in front of me every day.

I think that unless you're blessed enough to work for a small, relatively unbureaucratic organisation where your contribution is valued, nobody will really notice if you have a rather unproductive day in the office. Whereas a day off sick goes on your employment record. So crawl in, spend the day drinking Lemsip and go home early.

I think employees, especially the kind of high-achievers on our LJ flists, get hung up on having to do their work really well, and worrying about infecting other people, and end up taking a day off sick for the good of the company. But a day off sick for the good of the company looks the same as any other day off sick on your employment record. I could name a friend of ours who's been thoroughly bitten in the arse by this.

(Freelancing is a completely different kettle of fish because you get paid to do a specific job and you have a responsibility to manage expectations if you genuinely don't think you'll be well enough.)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

It depends how much they have to do and how warm and far away work is and by what transport method.

[lnr]

not much, warm, 4.5 miles, on a bicycle :-)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I think a cold is like chicken pox, you are infectious before you get all the symptoms, so you got a cold from somebody who has only just started to feel ill themselves.

venta is clearly radiating a field of typos at me today, whenever I have replied to her I have spelt something wrong.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Oh, stay at home. Cycling 4.5 miles in this weather will only make it come back again.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Depends - I have a short commute and a warm office and don't often get the sort of cold that causes me to sneeze in a loud and obnoxious manner every five minutes... plus if I stay home I'll just sleep all day which is not actually at all good for me. So I tend to go to work and not get very much done.

[gailsedotes.livejournal.com]

if its been going on for over a week stay home - or maybe put off being properly ill til friday then get a decent 3 days rest

[imc.livejournal.com]

These days if I had a bad cold I'd probably take a day off (particularly if smallclanger is also unwell and therefore needs looking after). No point coming in and making everyone else miserable too.

There was a time when I went several years without taking a sick day — in those days, if I had a cold I'd come in as usual and just sit in a corner.

[rmc28]

It varies - if I can think straight, then I will usually go in. If I am really tired/stupid, I will stay home.

This week I have had similar symptoms to you, and strongly considered staying home, but did in the end go in, all stuffed up and runny-nosed, and swallowing decongestant, because I was the only person left to do some essential work. I think if we'd been less thin on the ground, I'd have stayed home. I'm wondering whether to go early today/stay home tomorrow anyway, now we're past the busiest bit of the week (I hope!).

Working from home because you're ill is very frowned on here: I've been explicitly told that if I'm too ill to come in, I should take sick leave and rest as much as possible. Also our remote access is very flakey from my Ubuntu box and I haven't yet managed to get it to work satisfactorily.

[lnr]

Can I just say I think that's a very interesting way of looking at it, and not one I'd considered.

Personally if I stay home it's definitely more for my benefit than for the company's - and I'm glad I work somewhere that doesn't make me feel bad for doing so. I'm really not in the high achiever mindset though.

To be honest the bulk sick leave when I was depressed is probably rather more significant on my record than the odd few days a year with colds.

Mind you without access to a kettle lemsip in the office would be a nuisance, I'd have to take my mug up to the canteen and ask them to fill it for me.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I had a cold a couple of weeks ago. It was what I would consider a mild cold (I still had a brain, and could even intermittently breathe through my nose) so since I'm new at this company, and hope to be taking a lot of time off soon for an operation, I went in.

That mild cold dragged on for the next week, and it took another week for my lungs to recover.

Next time, I'm just going to rest the dratted thing and get better.

[psychicmedium26.livejournal.com]

I took your poll just to see the results! Saw it referenced over in the loos.

[lnr]

No worries. But you can get the results by clicking on the link at the top of the poll without voting if you want to. Or just click the submit button without ticking anything and you'll get the results without showing up in them.

The more the merrier though as far as I'm concerned, or I wouldn't have posted the link :-)