A manager demanded a doctor’s note for a single sick day. It backfired immediately.

A 26-year-old server woke up barely able to breathe. He asked his manager for a single sick day. The request was denied. His boss then issued an ultimatum: he must bring in a formal doctor’s note, or the absence would be marked unexcused. In a July post on Reddit’s r/MaliciousCompliance, the server (posting as u/yanni_lam4) explained the trap. The service industry is notorious for guilting sick employees and demanding notes from doctors they do not provide health insurance to see. The server had already been wearing a mask on his previous shifts, so being told to prove his illness felt like being called a liar. But his employer forgot he was still covered by his father’s insurance, so the worker went to the doctor and had them write a note for four days off. He walked into work and handed it to his manager. “Here is my doctors note, and this is the date I will be back,” he said. Representative image of patient being handed a doctor’s note. Photo credit: Iulian Catalin’s Images via Canva. A few months later, they tried the same thing. The server went back to the doctor, got a note for even more days, and asked the doctor to add a line about exactly when he would stop being infectious around the food they were serving. He has never been asked for a doctor’s note since. “They know they can give me the one or two days I ask for, or they can give me the week the doc gives me,” he wrote. “But I will not be working while sick if I do not want to.” The post drew over 8,100 upvotes and a thread in which service workers broke down the same math. “I am certain less time would be taken off, if they gave more time off,” one commenter wrote. “With the way it is now, I am incentivized to get a week off instead of a day.”