‘My cat is sick’ and 62 other fake excuses employees give to ditch work for March Madness

After 63 basketball games in the March Madness tournament, Virginia beat out Texas Tech in a dramatic overtime game to be crowned the 2019 NCAA champions. But to get to the final winner, college players competed in 28 games that started before 5 p.m. PT — for a total of 17 hours and 5 minutes of gametime during the workday. That begs the question: How do diehard fans watch those games? Stunningly, 44% of March Madness fans said they’ve lied in order to watch the NCAA games during work hours, and we asked those folks to reveal the best real-life fake excuse they’ve used to dupe the boss*. TSheets then hosted its own bracket-style competition, where Instagrammers narrowed down the top 16 fake excuses to the king of all excuses. “My dog was hit by a car” fell on Tuesday to the No. 1 best excuse for getting out of work to watch March Madness: “My cat is sick.”We can’t guarantee these all actually worked for the people who used them, but here are the 63 best fake excuses we received from employees to watch March Madness during work hours. If you’ve tried one that worked for you, let us know in the comments below!

1. My cat is sick
2. My dog got hit by a car
3. My bracket is perfect
4. My wife is in labor
5. I got robbed
6. Tummy troubles
7. I have pink eye
8. Steph Curry is my brother
9. I have a migraine
10. I’m snowed in
11. My grandma died
12. My car won’t start
13. I have a toothache
14. Family emergency
15. I have 3-point fever
16. My car got stolen
17. I had food poisoning and didn't want to infect the office with my germs
18. I faked a pancreatic attack and was able to get a doctor’s note for that
19. Doctor’s appointment
20. I have been admitted to the hospital
21. I had surgery
22. I got food poisoning from food provided by the office
23. I had to take my wife to the emergency room. I wasn't even married at the time.
24. Explosive diarrhea
25. Need to watch my kid's performance
26. My son broke his arm
27. I have to babysit my grandkids
28. I say one of my kids is sick to be able to use sick time to watch my favorite teams
29. My cat is on fire
30. Dog has a vet appointment
31. Fell down my steps and bruised my ribs.
32. Car accident
33. My elderly neighbor locked herself out of the house, and I’m the only person that has a key that is still alive. If I don’t make it home to let her in, she could wander around and get lost because of the dementia. I could never live with myself.
34. I told my boss one of our co-workers was at the game and we should watch to see if we could see him
35. Boosts employee morale
36. I needed to watch to see if any of our clients were advertising
37. Meeting a client
38. I'll tell my boss that a customer was asking to put the game on
39. I have to rearrange the supply closet
40. I’m doing research for an article
41. We HAVE to keep up with it in order to discuss it with our customers
42. I made up a conference call with a guy from our Atlanta office who was using me for the same excuse!
43. It's to study the bracket system for a project at the end of the year
44. My car needed work and I had to run to the garage
45. I’m having a tooth pulled
46. One of the patients wants the game on
47. If I don’t get to see the game, I’m quitting
48. I'll be in the lab for most of the day so I can get caught up
49. It was a way to teach my students about math
50. I'm in the work pool
51. I had a friend’s son playing
52. My undergraduate school team played that day
53. My brother’s playing in the championship game! (I don’t have a brother)
54. Studying statistics
55. It’s my birthday!
56. Loan problems — at the time I was working on purchasing first home
57. I am getting a fever!
58. I had the cramps
59. I have a tendon condition at my ankle, requiring me to stay immobile and at my desk all day
60. My mom is sick, and I have to keep checking to make sure she’s ok
61. I have a family trip
62. I have an emergency call I’m waiting for
63. Dude. I have a lot of money riding on these games. I gotta watch it!

Questions? Email Alysha Love (alysha_love@intuit.com) for the full data set, breakdowns by demographic, or infographics for your website.

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*Methodology: On March 6 and 8, 2019, TSheets commissioned a mobile phone survey through Pollfish of 1,067 employed U.S. adults who report watching March Madness at work during the traditional workweek, with a margin of error of ±3 percentage points. The margin of error is larger for subgroups.

TSheets welcomes the re-use of this data under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original source is cited with attribution to “TSheets.”