Billions Lost to Good Health

(Tra-la-li-lallie: scientists frolic in a moonlit clearing to celebrate the approach of a deadline.)

Millions of man-hours, and billions of man-pounds, are lost each week in Britain due to good health, shocking statistics in a report out today reveal.

“When employees wake up of a morning to find themselves feeling pretty much okay, they often feel obliged not to call in sick,” said the report’s author, Professor Elspeth Martlet.

“That’s right,” agreed inker Eddy Vortex, who did the colouring in on the report. “Wellness is costing us bigtime. It may be peer pressure or a misplaced sense of duty. Some may just sense that they’ve run out of credible excuses and are in danger of losing their income. Whatever, it can be very hard to make that crucial call.”

The study paints a grim picture of the consequences. When workers feel unable to “pull a sickie”, the waking hours they have to hand are drastically cut. Then there are the lost earnings: while toiling at one job, employees have limited opportunities for doing others, effectively costing the British economy a further £19 billion.

“And it’s not just the hours wasted at work,” Martlet explained. “Many jobs leave you worn out by the time you clock off, and in no mood to explore the manifold wonders of this world.”

“Next thing you know, you’re dead,” said Ed.

Their colleague, Professor Hamish Twiceblind, was not available for comment, as he is skiving this year, but a group of travelling scientists, who were bunking off from another job helped out with the typesetting and graphs, as well as furnishing ethanol from their mobile lab, and experimental tryptamine derivatives, for the end-of-report revelries.

Their raucous songs about the cosmos are not recorded.

The study is published in the peer-review journal Working Sound, but you will not find a link to it so as to judge for yourself because, by the time you read this, your search engine will be full of mangled “news” versions, Chinese-whispering back and forth off each other – fact-from-fact, true-news-from-true-news – as they evolve towards a more clickable meme.