Why don’t I have employees? Quite simply put, I’m not interested in doing adult daycare again. I’ve been there, done that, and I’m not doing that again. The day I had to explain to an employee why little pigtails (the kind a 3-year-old would wear) weren’t appropriate for client meetings and why it was important to wear clothes that actually matched one another… I knew my calling as an employer was over. These are things one might expect a 29-year-old to already know. I had reached my breaking point, I think.

BusinessWeek has a great article on employees who slack off and abuse paid leave. What! I’m shocked to learn that employees spend lots of time while on-the-clock doing stuff that’s not related to what they’re paid to do. Shocked, I say!

Okay, not really. The article, aptly titled “Shirking Working: The War on Hooky” details some of the modern methods used to analyze the work patterns of employees. It’s estimated that $74 billion is lost annually to absenteeism, and that employees only work for about 85% of their pay. They goof off the rest of the time.

Companies giving greater scrutiny to employee absences include Wal-Mart, Delphi, Dell, Georgia-Pacific, and Southwest Airlines. Some are calling this “absence management.” Southwest says their new software has already saved them $2 million annually in reduced administrative costs.

Here’s the cool stuff: The new software can track things like the employee who is chronically “sick” on Monday or around holidays. Nice.