Ragbag Headliners

How To Call In Sick Without Jeopardizing Your Job

Eric McCoole, 38, called in sick on St. Patrick's Day in 2000, and no, he didn't have a cold, the flu, or a sinus infection. He didn't even have the sniffles.

"Being of Irish descent, I wanted to take the day off," says McCoole, a government employee in Alpine, California.

He called early enough so he could leave a message and skip the awkward talk with his boss. "The next day a supervisor came over the PA system and announced, 'Two people called in sick yesterday, St. Patrick's Day: Eric McCoole and Brian O'Malley.' Luckily, everyone laughed," McCoole recalls. "He said next year we should flip a coin to decide who takes that day off."

Ah, the good old days. Few folks in today's workplace are calling in sick even if they have a cold, the flu, or a sinus infection. Given the economic meltdown, the highest unemployment rate in years, and layoffs around every corner, workers are more likely to drag themselves into the office even when they feel like death warmed over. –Read more at CNN Health 

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Why We Can't Kill Bedbugs

In the old days killing bedbugs was easy. If you saw one of the critters you'd waltz down to the local pharmacy, drop few bucks on a box of DDT, and zap, problem solved.

Today -- in a DDT free country -- exterminating the bugs can be expensive.

A professional extermination to deal with a problem that all too often won't go away costs somewhere between $200 to $1500 -- per room.

It's not that DDT should come back. First off, most bedbugs are immune to that now, too. And second, the chemical and those that followed it are largely responsible for the near-extinction of birds like the bald eagle, and who knows how many terminal illnesses in humans.

But it's the 21st century. Can't we come up with some other safe yet affordable means to kill these critters from hell? -Read more at CNN Money 

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Do We Still Need Daylight Saving Time?

For nearly a century, Americans have been springing forward and falling back, and this year will be no different. Come Sunday morning, we’ll be snuggled soundly in bed as the clocks fall back an hour. Daylight saving time is the autumnal gift that provides the proverbial snooze button to our circadian rhythm.

But whether or not we should get that extra sleep has spurred some passionate debate from many disparate groups.

To better understand the situation, it’s best to look at why we do this annual clock change each fall and spring. Agrarian cultures built their societies around sunlight, waking up with the sun to toil in the field and heading home as the sun lowered beneath the horizon. But the Industrial Revolution, and electricity in particular, brought the freedom to unshackle us from nature’s clock.

As far back as 1897, countries began instituting daylight saving time, adding an hour of sunlight to the day. This meant communities could be more productive — people could work longer, and when work was done it was still bright enough to run errands and stimulate the economy. The added daylight also meant more exposure to vitamin D and the added time for people to exercise outdoors. –Read more at Yahoo Shine 

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Labor Board: Facebook Vent Against Supervisor Not Grounds For Firing

In what could prove to be a precedent-setting case, the National Labor Relations Board has issued a complaint against a Connecticut company for firing an employee after she posted critical, derogatory comments about her supervisor on Facebook.

The company, ambulance service American Medical Response, says emergency medical technician Dawnmarie Souza was fired because of "multiple, serious complaints about her behavior," not because she took to a social networking site to describe her supervisor in various unflattering terms, among the mildest of which was comparing the supervisor to a psychiatric patient.

The labor board, a federal agency that oversees union elections and investigates claims of unfair labor practices, accuses the company of illegally terminating Souza and denying her access to union representation during an investigatory review.

The labor relations board argues that workers' criticism of their bosses on social networking sites like Facebook is generally "a protected concerted activity."

"You are permitted to talk about terms and conditions with employees or anyone else, it's public because you are protected under the National Labor Act," says Jonathan Kreisberg, the board's regional director in Hartford, Connecticut.—Read more at CNN Tech