[AlexC04]

To be fair, I think he's a fake guy. Look at the start of the "article" it has all the weasel words that you'd expect to see in a dodgy email forward. "I once heard a story of a an unnamed manager at an unnamed company who..."

Go to Snopes and you can find a hundred emails that start like that.

What's there's a word for this type of story, that I can't recall at the moment. Straw-man set up to illustrate the moral of the tale. Truth is with only so many hours in a day, and burn out is just a much a risk as anything else, work-life balance is sometimes required.

The article might be interesting and eye opening if you're a teenager, when I was a high school teacher, the constant use of low value excuses was worth drawing attention to. In fact occasionally delighting a high-school teacher with a new excuse sounds appropriate and realistic. A manager at a big-company though? Fuck that, adults do sometimes have real excuses - their kid was sick, the roof on their house was leaking, whatever. Could you imagine some dude checking off "ahh sick child #123, delightful" when you told him your kid was sick? You'd punch that miserable fucker in the nuts.

I call bullshit.

[BorisBomega]

I left those details out because I didn't think they would add to the story. The big company was KPN to which I sold my WiFi Hotspot operator in 2003. The manager who told me the story was Jan Kroon and it was about a manager he reported to. See, all that info doesn't make the story that more interesting really.

[dhimes]

Actually, it's those details that do make the story interesting. Some little details that make the characters seem real are essential to hold your audience. (At least, so says my wife, who is a writer.)