Excuses, excuses: Web searches for reasons to skip work soar in 2022

A woman typing on a laptop on a train in New Jersey. A recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that Americans collectively save 60 million hours of commuting time every day by working from home. — AP

US employees are scouring the Internet for excuses to miss work – just as bosses call them back to their desks.

The total number of Google searches for plausible reasons to play hooky shot up over the last two years, topping two million in 2022, according to an analysis by Frank Recruitment Group, a global employment firm. In 2018, that figure was a little over 300,000. The firm analysed traffic across 10 of the most popular search terms, including multiple variations of “realistic excuses for missing work”.