It's tough to lose the sick-time 'security blanket'

After 13-plus years working for the same company, you find that you've collected many things.

During my time at the Deseret News, I gathered many, many tearsheets from the newspaper. This made sense during my first few years as a reporter, when the Internet was still relatively new. I needed clips of my stories as a kind of personal reference library.

However, when the time came for me to leave my job, and I discovered this treasure trove of yellowed newsprint in the drawers of various file cabinets, I decided it was time to throw most of it into the recycling bin. (My wife will tell you that I still kept far too many old clips, but I couldn't be expected to toss EVERYTHING!)

Another thing I accumulated during my years at the News was not as tangible, but it was important, nonetheless. And I wish I could have taken some of it with me.

What constituted this mystery collection? Why, sick leave, of course.

As I've mentioned before in this column, I almost never took a sick day during my first eight or nine years at the News. Mostly that's because I was fairly healthy, but on several occasions I was sick and still went to work.

I know going to work when you're ill is a bad idea, but it made sense to me at the time. I usually was part of a small team, and my absence meant another reporter or editor would have to do double-duty. I didn't want that to happen, so I'd get the best over-the-counter medicine I could find and work through the illness.

While I was more likely to take a sick day during my last few years at the News — partially because I was getting older, but I hope also because I was a bit wiser — I still didn't come close to using up all of my accumulated sick leave.

In fact, when I left my deseretnews.com job in September, I had more than 500 hours of sick leave available. Five hundred hours. That's more than 12 workweeks, or three months.

I hoped I would never need that much sick leave, but it was nice to know it was there. It was like a security blanket. I knew that if I ever did get sick — like the year I missed the entire week of Christmas with pneumonia — I didn't have to worry about taking unpaid days off or trying to come up with some other arrangement with my employers.

But then I moved on to my new job, and I left that security blanket behind.