I don’t have many lofty thoughts on the topic of working while sick. It’s just that I recently overheard someone coughing in public, and it made me uncomfortable. Not as uncomfortable as it would have in March or April 2020. But uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable in a way that it wouldn’t have made me in 2019, you know? And that takes me back to the world of the white-collar office before 2020. When people showed up to work, in-person, while sick. And they did it all the damn time.
What was with that?
“Ryan is sick”
About 7 or 8 years ago, I was sitting in a meeting with about a dozen people in a conference room. One person went to one side of the room, took a look at the person next to him, and then crossed the room to sit in the seat next to me. He gave me a smile, leaned in close, and said, “Sorry to sit so close, but Ryan is sick.”
Indeed, Ryan was sick. He was very sick. He had a bad cold at best and maybe a flu.
As everyone knows after March 2020, Ryan exposed the entire room to whatever he was fighting. And he recklessly did so for no good reason. At least we recognize it as such today. Were this to happen at my workplace today, he would work from home. Or he’d just stay in bed.
In short, we’re far more aware of these issues than we used to be.
Illness, Work, and the White-Collar Office
I worked in a white-collar office job in those days. It’s actually the same company where I work today. And, to be clear, all the things a person thinks about when they think about the office world applied to that setting 7 or 8 years ago. We all had a decent salary. Everyone in the room had very good health insurance. Ryan could’ve stayed home with no serious consequences to his paycheck or career. No one in the room had an unreasonably high work load.
We’re talking about a totally different world from the one ‘essential workers‘ face.
Officers workers faced different issues in those days. Many – especially managers and ‘leaders’ – wrapped themselves up so completely in their work and their own sense of self-importance that they plowed their way right through the day. No matter how sick they happened to be. It was a marker of status. It was the stuff where allegedly promotions were made.
We still have problems in the office world. Plenty of them.
But we minimized at least one problem.
