The fine art of faking sick at work.

Came in the office yesterday morning and no one was here. A voice mail from one woman, "I have a bad migraine." A voice mail from another, "My kid is sick." And the big boss is on holidays.

That leaves just me. It was a beautiful summer day. This was the classic fake-sick-day off. Everyone does it, and at my work, everyone happened to do it at the same time.

The weird thing is I planned last weekend to take Weds off as a fake sick day. When my co-workers both did it at the same time, a day earlier than me, (they beat me by a day) that put my own fake sick day in jeopardy. How could I fake sick a day after they did? That would look bad.

Unless I claimed to "catch" something from them. But then if they were truly faking they would know that I didn't catch anything. Still, this was the excuse I used.

I phoned in today and said, "I don't feel well." Faked sick.

A few thoughts about faking sick:

• You might want to build up your sickness the day before. Put Kleenex by your desk. Blow your nose loudly. Cough a lot. Say, "I feel like crap." When a coworker suggests that you go home, say, "No I'm gonna tough it out." Makes you look like a hero. The next day is your fake sick day.

• Fake sick mid-week. It's less obvious than when you fake sick on a Friday or Monday for a long weekend. If you're sick on Friday everyone knows it's fake.

• You can tell it's a fake sick if the person is back to work the next day. If they were truly sick, they'd take more than one day off. No one recovers from sickness in just one day.

• On the other hand, if the person shows up for work then leaves early or after a couple hours, this could be a genuine illness. Unless they are super-devious and planned to do that to make their fake-sick look amazingly real.

• The worst part of fake sick is the phone-in to the boss. That's why it's preferable just to email. If you have to speak with the boss, make yourself sound miserable. I do this by frowning as I talk, and speaking in a very low, unenthusiastic mono-tone voice.

• Sometimes you have to fake healthy (meaning you have to go to work sick and pretend you're healthy or people might get angry). The perfect excuse is "allergies". "No, that's not a cold or flu. It's just allergies."

• In my last job, they made us watch a video about how to sneeze. (You shouldn't sneeze into your hands. It's unsanitary and just gross. Instead you need to sneeze into the shirt-sleeve of your arm. The germs die quickly this way.) They also put hand-sanitizer everywhere and had meetings where they told us never to come to work sick and had posters about the flu up in the lunch room. Here's an idea: if you care so much about our health why not just give us more sick days? That way we won't come to work sick.

• The best illness to fake-sick is "stomach ache". If you say "headache" a do-good coworker might offer you aspirin at their desk. But if you have a stomach ache, no coworker will offer you exlax. Plus no one wants to be around someone with a bad crampy, diarrhea-like stomach. They want you to go home.