It comes upon you suddenly and without warning, so there’s no problem if you came to work appearing perfectly healthy the day before, only to get unexpectedly dumped that evening, requiring a mandatory day of crying in bed.Real food poisoning often requires that you spend much of your day lying on the bathroom floor by the toilet, which is exactly what you’d be doing if you were, say, wretchedly hungover.“There are several reasons people tend to fall back on food poisoning as an explanation: While food poisoning happens – US Centers for Disease Control estimates that 48 million Americans come down with a foodborne illness each year – it’s also conveniently gross enough that no one wants the details. It’s a perennial favorite on message boards where workers swap tips about what to tell their bosses to take advantage of sunny days or otherwise skip out on the office, and CNBC has even gone so far as to recommend it as an apropos summertime excuse: “There are a lot of festivals, picnics, work events, county fairs, state fairs and other events where people eat all kinds of crazy things, so your chances of getting food poisoning probably go up in the summer,” it noted in a piece from 2012.” “Food poisoning… is an excuse that is wildly overused, suggesting an ominous world in which the average diner must be under near-constant attack from armies of raw chicken and bombardments of unwashed lettuce leaves. Todd makes a compelling case for why food poisoning is the most lame yet effective call in excuse ever. As a manager, I’d heard this excuse or its euphemistic alter ego “It must have been something I ate” dozens of times over the years, but I never thought to question it until I read Sarah Todd’s piece on Quartz titled “Why You Should Never Tell The Boss You Have Food Poisoning.”

The adult equivalent of the dog ate my homework is food poisoning. Because of loyalty, of course, and because…dog lips. But somewhere along the line, it must have been used by some enterprising student who felt safe because the dog wouldn’t talk. It would not have worked for me because a.) I usually had my homework done and b.) we did not have a dog. I never told a teacher that the dog ate my homework in grade school.

The dog ate my homework