Employee writes detailed sick-leave excuses to troll workplace for being too nosy, leaves them regretting it

In an October 17 Reddit post, an employee, who goes by u/Helpful_Loss_3739, shared how they managed to make their company’s accounting team regret their own sick-leave policy. In his post that has gained 13k upvotes so far, the employee explained that at their Finnish workplace, every employee has to fill out a form when returning from sick leave. It includes basic details like the length of the absence and the type of leave. "But it also has this whole section that I have always found rather direct, which is basically making you describe your symptoms. I presume it is there because, as you know, bosses are always paranoid about people faking sick leave," the post read.

"So, after a while, I started to make sure that they hate their own nosy forms, and I started giving symptom descriptions in unnecessary and graphic detail. Here are some of my favorites over the years," the employee said. One of them read, "My diarrhea was so loose that it bordered on drinkable water." Another said, "The clumps of phlegm that I coughed up could stick light objects to walls. This is a confirmed fact." He even added, "While I did not proceed to test this, by all accounts my bowel movements behaved as a non-Newtonian fluid," and, "The pus-filled discharge smelled so bad that it could knock out small mammals."

At first, his boss would only nod in the hallway and say, "I read your report." Eventually, she stopped reacting altogether. As the employee put it, "She seems used to it. It's not really for her anyway, and she usually just skims through them," adding that she mostly felt bad for the accounting department. "I have never met anyone from accounting. Then again they still keep the same form after years and years, so maybe they enjoy reading these?" the post read. They also clarified that the form isn’t legally required. "This is in Finland," he explained. "I could probably just not put anything there, and no one would mind. I just want to make a point."

While the post was meant as a joke, it struck a nerve for anyone who’s ever felt that workplace surveillance goes too far. Privacy experts have long warned that when employers demand unnecessary details about workers’ health, it creates a sense of surveillance rather than care. A paper titled "Privacy at Work: A Review and a Research Agenda for a Contested Terrain" examines the tension between employee rights and employer data-collection demands. It notes that transparency, consent, and purpose limitation (only collecting what’s needed for specific reasons) are key to maintaining trust. When those are missing, it becomes a question of workers feeling surveilled or micromanaged.

The post drew hundreds of comments from people around the world who compared how differently sick leave works in their countries. u/xpiation wrote, "Exactly how it is in Australia too. Sick note and nothing more. USA sounds like a hellhole of misery and mistreatment." u/Count2Zero commented, "This is why I love living in Germany. If you’re not able to work, you get a doctor’s note, and that goes to your employer. It basically says, '[Name] is not able to work from [day 1] until [day X].' That’s it. During that time, you’re on leave. Your boss has no legal rights to ask you WHY or HOW you were sick." u/onFilm added, "Here in Canada, we just say we’re sick, and that’s it. Being forced to get a doctor’s note is wild stuff."

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