Letter from Buffalo Skiver and avoiding work during the World Cup
Howdy, Cowboys! Greetings from the wide open prairies of Skivers. I thought I’d drop you a line to let you know how I was getting on. I’ll tell you one thing: things are definitely looking up in the world of Buff, yours truly, and that’s because the football World Cup starts next week!
I’ve been waiting for the World Cup a long time and can’t believe it’s finally here. I’ll have to follow the games that England plays, of course, and I’m also a big fan of the Brazil team so it’s really exciting to see them play at home.
It’s handy for many in the UK that the games are held in another time zone because that means the matches will be played mainly outside normal working hours. However – unfortunately – I work the late shifts and so it’ll take some ingenuity to make sure I don’t miss a single match. Luckily, I’ve had plenty of practice in the art of skiving. I’ve already made a plan for the next few weeks to make sure I don’t miss any of the action. For example, I have to catch the opening match – of course! – and it’s on at 9pm on Thu, which is right in the middle of my shift. What I plan to do is to go to work as usual but volunteer to do the boring admin in the office so that I can watch the match on the work computer over the internet. When they wonder why the admin stuff is still unfinished the next day, I can just blame it on IT problems.
The first England game is on a Saturday, which is fine because I’m off at weekends anyway but the next games that I really want to see after that one are on at 8pm during the week. I’ll need to save my sickie days for the semi-finals because I don’t want to trip any absence triggers so I just need to be a bit clever about how I play things. I think I’ll get away with sloping off early at least one of the days if I make sure to get assigned the right job on a remote site with no on-site supervisors. And if worst comes to worst, I’ll try to catch most of the match on the TVs in the reception. There shouldn’t be many people about at that time. As for the semi-finals, I’ll just phone in sick on the 7th July, the day before the match on the 8th, and fake an illness for 3 days so that I can catch both the matches – after all, longer sickies come across more believable than just a one-day cold!
If you’re looking for some help to keep track of the Buffalo Skivers in your organisation, why not take a look at Engage? It’s a fantastic tool for tracking and managing absence.