5 Foolproof Excuses for Calling in Sick After a Three-Day Bender
Your tongue feels like a gym sock that lost a bar fight.
Your liver has hired a lawyer and is filing for emancipation.
Somewhere in the last 72 hours you texted your ex, your landlord, and a Wendy’s drive-thru speaker you mistook for a priest.
It is now 6:58 a.m. and you have to convince a sober, employed adult that you are merely sick.
The 5 foolproof excuses for calling in sick after a three-day bender exist, they have been stress-tested by drunks far dumber than you, and not one requires you to confess the word “tequila.”
Three rules govern all of them.
Be boring, be a little disgusting, and be completely impossible to fact-check.
Food poisoning, the excuse God gave us for a reason
Nobody on Earth asks a follow-up question about diarrhea, which is the entire genius of food poisoning and why it has gone undefeated since the invention of the gas-station taquito.
You don’t need a story, just a culprit and a tone.
The culprit is “those oysters” or “some sushi I really shouldn’t have trusted,” delivered in the wrecked voice of a man who has seen things in his own bathroom that no man should see.
Do not elaborate.
The second you describe the actual color of anything, your boss’s brain mercifully shuts the conversation down and approves your absence to make it stop.
Sound hollowed-out, and imply you are perched on a toilet like a man at sea who has stopped fighting it.
The relative who lives conveniently far away
Death is the one thing even more unquestionable than diarrhea, and it carries the bonus of making your boss feel like a monster for owning a calendar at all.
You are not killing off anyone real.
You are reaching into the vast genealogical fog and producing a great-aunt nobody can disprove, ideally one who lived in a state your boss has never visited and cannot spell.
Keep it vague and keep it heavy.
“Something happened with my family and I have to drive up there” is a sentence so loaded with implied tragedy that asking for specifics would make your manager the villain of their own HR seminar.
The bender, meanwhile, continues in the dignified privacy of your grief, blinds drawn, phone face-down, mourning a woman who never existed.
Whatever’s going around
Half of every office is permanently “fighting something off.”
You are simply the brave soul who lost.
Cough once, mention that “a couple people had it last week,” and you have quietly laundered your hangover through the entire building’s ventilation system.
The household disaster that legally requires you to stay home and wait for a man named Dwayne
One of these excuses doesn’t even require you to be sick at all, only mildly inconvenienced by the brutal and unforgiving physics of owning property in this economy.
A pipe burst, or the water heater “did something” that now requires a man from the gas company to come look at it.
His arrival window, naturally, is a luxuriously vague “sometime between 8 a.m. and the heat death of the universe,” a span you intend to spend fully horizontal.
No boss alive will fight you on this, because every adult has been personally betrayed by their own plumbing and knows the helpless rage of losing a whole day to a no-show repairman.
Dwayne is sacred.
You cannot leave the house, because Dwayne might arrive, and if you miss Dwayne you drop to the bottom of a waiting list that does not forgive.
Rotate the catastrophe so you don’t become the guy whose apartment floods every third Friday:
- A “gas smell” you can’t locate but refuse to die over.
- A locksmith situation, because the key “just spun in the lock,” which is a real thing that happens and a wonderful thing that didn’t.
- A washing machine that “walked across the room,” instantly believed because everyone’s has staged at least one escape attempt.
- A tree. Any tree. Near anything.
The beauty is that none of it involves your body, which is excellent, because your body is currently an active crime scene.
You sound responsible. Civic, even. A hungover degenerate transformed, through the sheer sorcery of fictional infrastructure, into an upstanding homeowner nobly doing his sacred duty to the property.
The migraine nobody can see and you can’t prove
The migraine is the thinking drunk’s excuse, because it lives entirely inside your skull where no boss or god can fact-check it.
You can’t look at light, screens are pure agony, and there’s an “aura,” a word that sounds medical enough to make you seem almost sophisticated about your own suffering.
It also describes, with eerie precision, exactly how you feel after three days of treating your bloodstream like a punch bowl at a frat reunion.
Speak slowly, like every word is costing you a dollar.
Mention that you “already took something and it’s not touching it,” which paints you as a responsible patient rather than a man who drank a marina’s worth of well vodka.
One last thing, and it’s the only thing that gets people caught
Your excuse is bulletproof. Your Instagram is not.
Every airtight food-poisoning saga has been detonated by a single tagged photo of its author doing a body shot off a stranger at 1 a.m. while allegedly fighting for his life over a toilet bowl.
So go dark.
Kill your location services and resist the animal urge to post something devastating about your coworkers, because the algorithm has ratted out far smarter people than you.
Then chug a gallon of water, eat something with an actual name, and call in before 7 so it sounds like you’ve been suffering nobly for hours.
The job will survive a day without you, and your dignity probably won’t, but that ship sailed somewhere around hour fourteen.
