The Call-and-Confirm Doctrine: When ‘Call In’ Means ‘Prove Your Sickness’

If your workplace rule says “call in” and your manager treats that as an invitation to receive a recital rather than information, they aren’t enforcing attendance policy — they’re enforcing a ritual.

Call it the Call‑and‑Confirm Doctrine: the employee’s obligation is to expend effort to produce a live affirmation of absence; the manager’s obligation (unwritten) is to refuse every recorded affirmation until they feel personally satisfied. In toy‑model form: employee wants minimal effort when sick; manager wants to deter slack and preserve the sense of being indispensable; the equilibrium is repeated dialing until one party’s phone battery or patience dies. (Reddit’s own commentary: “call continuously…3am…and sick? Call again and again and again and again until they answer.”)

There’s a neat logical loophole that people pointed out — if the rule literally says “call,” then calling and leaving a message satisfies it. But that’s the distinction between rule-as-text and rule-as-ritual. The former is evidence; the latter is status performance. One commenter sensibly proposed a corresponding manager duty: if employees must call, managers must answer — an elegant symmetry that never makes it into the memo.

So what’s the moral? This is less about flu etiquette and more about signaling: the phone call is rarely about conveying facts and mostly about proving obedience. It’s efficient in a very narrow sense — it preserves managerial theater — and disastrously inefficient in the one that matters: public health and common sense. If the company wanted the truth rather than the ritual, the policy would read: “Text, voicemail, carrier pigeon — but if you are contagious, try not to show up.” Until then, expect a lot of frantic redialing and the occasional 3am guilt trip.