sick-day

A six-panel comic, mostly green-tinted, shows a woman with brown hair in a tank top talking on the phone, presumably to her workplace, making up an increasingly absurd excuse for missing work. She says she can't come in because she is literally on fire ("lots of it, it's bad"), explains she coughed because of the smoke, worries that if she touched a coworker they'd catch the fire and spread it, says she took anti-inflammatories "for the fire because that is what they are for," and politely ends the call. In the final panel she turns to a shirtless man typing at a computer and says, "Isn't it great how society has become totally conflict-averse?" The man, also on a phone, replies that he's telling his boss he can't work because he turned into a swarm of bees and they're trying to find their way home. The joke: faking sick has escalated into wildly elaborate fictional excuses that everyone politely accepts. In the votey aftercomic, a loose black-and-white sketch of the stubbled man's face, he adds into the phone, "Buzz or whatever."