Dragging your sleeply bod out of a warm bed at some obscene hour in the middle of winter can be as tempting as the prospect of pot-holing in Rhyll. As for those rare sunny days in July - who wants to bake in an office when they could be burning their sun-starved limbs in the garden? That's why a great British tradition came about. It's called 'The Sickie'.

The art of skiving

As explained in the Oxford dictionary: The Sickie n 1: Lying through one's teeth to one's boss to scrounge a day off work to fritter away sleeping or loafing about watching daytime telly.

Which resourceful slacker who came up with this labour-saving device, heaven knows, but it isn't always as easy as it sounds. 'Pulling a Sickie' takes planning.

Drew Bolton, a twenty-six year old Business Analyst from Kent didn't achieve the results she wanted: 'I'd been out partying and couldn't get up, so I rang a colleague and told him I was hungover and was going to stay in bed. I hated my job anyway and hoped my boss would sack me. Instead of passing on my real message, the sap told them I had some killer bug. I was still in that bloody office six months later.'

Stressed to the max

The main reason people take time off is because of dissatisfaction with their job. Over 30% of staff turnover is due to stress in the workplace.

When you consider that the British workforce is made up of approximately twenty million employees (not including directors and managers), who are contracted to spend, on average, forty hours a week toiling, it's not difficult to imagine the diverse effect absenteeism has on British industry every year. It isn't just time that's lost, it's money too - billions, in fact.

The problem for employers is that it's impossible to tell whether their absent staff are in need of assistance because most don't voice their grievances. We'd rather take the day off wouldn't we?

Everyone's a slacker

Stress is a genuine reason to take time off work, but there are many less noble reasons - including an inability to get one's lazy bones out of bed and sneaking off for an interview with another firm. However, there are still many loyal employees who love their job and will only ever consider slacking off once in a while as a self-awarded bonus for all their hard graft.

It doesn't matter whether you're a star employee or not, everyone pulls a sickie sometime. Most of us only get about twenty paid days off a year, with a few bank holidays thrown in, so conjuring up an extra day here and there is well within the realms of possibility.

Ellie Jones, 31, ran her own theatre company for three years and found people management infuriating: 'I had to sack my stage manager because, in her first week, she blagged two days off, saying she'd got gastric flu, which was rubbish. I caught the dopey cow in the local Burger King scoffing a mountain of onion rings.'

A moral dilemma: to blag or not to blag?

So, the moral of the story so far? If you're going to pull a sickie do it in a professional manner. It will also help if your story is tighter than Peter Stringfellow's leather pants. And keep well away from the vicinity of your workplace or you might just get caught out.

Lastly, whether you love or hate your job, pulling a sickie is like chocolate - it's only there as an occasional treat. If you binge too much you could well find yourself completely stuffed.

Have you got any amusing sickie stories? Successes or failures? Tell us about them