Day 86. 76 pages, 31,989 words.
Well timed onset of delightful stomach cramping and general poop-bugness. I’ll take a little break and be back with you all for the next part as soon as my brain is working again.
– Posted from my ugh
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About Hatboy
I’m not often driven to introspection or reflection, but the question does come up sometimes. The big question. So big, there’s just no containing it within the puny boundaries of a single set of punctuationary bookends.
Who are these mysterious and unsung heroes of obscurity and shadow? What is their origin story? Do they have a prequel trilogy? What are their secret identities? What are their public identities, for that matter? What are their powers? Their abilities? Their haunted pasts and troubled futures? Their modus operandi? Where do they live anyway, and when? What do they do for a living? Do they really have these fantastical adventures, or is it a dazzlingly intellectual and overwrought metaphor? Or is it perhaps a smug and post-modern sort of metaphor? Is it a plain stupid metaphor, hedged around with thick wads of plausible deniability, a soap bubble of illusory plot dependent upon readers who don’t dare question it for fear of looking foolish? A flight of fancy, having dozed off in front of the television during an episode of something suitably spaceship-oriented? Do they have a quest, a handler, a mission statement, a department-level development objective in five stages?
I am Hatboy.
https://hatboy.blog/2013/12/17/metalude-who-are-creepy-and-hatboy/
Hatboy's Hatstand 
PIc or it didn’t-you know what, never mind.
Feel better, bro!
I almost sent the work nurse a pic when she was grilling me over the sick leave certification.
Grilling you? That sounds ridiculous…is that common? In my current and most of my past jobs it’s just been “I’m sick”, and “feel better!”
Even now that I have separate sick leave days (in other places it counted the same as vacation days…absurd), which you might not know is rare here in the US. The government has to give you them, though! XD
Well, this place has a slightly different system. They’re “piloting” a compromise between their antique system and the system that most offices here use.
By which I mean, most Finnish office jobs, there is a two-day rule where you can just call up your supervisor, and like you say, “I’m sick,” “Feel better!”
Longer than that, and you need to go to a doctor and get them to sign off.
Here, you needed a doctor’s signed paper basically immediately, which led to all sorts of retardery like having to hold in the vomit while sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, driving to a clinic with a 40° fever, and so on.
Now, their “pilot” basically means you call your supervisor (or in my case get to work and realise you’re still fucked, and tell you supervisor directly), and also call the work nurse. It wasn’t really a grilling, except I’m foreign and any series of questions and answers in Finnish qualifies as “a grilling”. She just asked about my symptoms, I explained what was happening, and she said she’d send the permission slip in the mail. It’s still cumbersome as fuck, but it avoids a certain amount of malingering, I guess? Don’t know.
Anyway, you get one or two days on this system, dependent on a next-day call to confirm your symptoms are still persisting, and then you need to go in and see a doctor. I think it’s still pretty crazy old-fashioned but in this case it was all good.
And fortunately we don’t have a set number of sick leave days. I suppose if we start taking too many the nurse will go “yeah, no, you need to come in and see us now, fakey.” But since this is the second sick leave I’ve taken in two and a half years, I think it’s okay.
Still, to answer your questions: no, not common; and yes, a little bit ridiculous. But I felt the “just take two days off and tell your boss you’re sick” rule was a bit too lenient.
To which I should add, any series of questions and answers in Finnish while I am suffering from moderate-to-severe stomach cramps and am poopsquirting into a bag on my stomach…
And also thanks. About 10 hours sleep on Thursday and then another 6 hours or so Thursday night, and I’m all good.