I think it's a bad idea. Hanging onto your callouts means you can use them when you really need to. Otherwise, you either go in really sick or have real trouble (like car engine trouble) and can't get the boss to work with you on it.

I had that exact problem come up today, and I asked him to change the schedule. He trusted that I was being honest. Other people, suspect in his eyes, don't get that consideration.

Basically, the boss knows when you're fucking them, and they will return the favor. Your coworkers will eventually get tired of carrying your ass too; sometimes when you call out you aren't hurting them. On the other hand, if it's a busy day and they're gonna hurt, you're letting the team down.

[hider=The Exception]That pious statement down, I will mention the exception to even my rule: I did a shift for omelets at brunch one Sunday, it was busy and I asked for pans that weren't burnt out because I was on the omelet station, and they called me a pussy, told me to stop crying and to 'learn some technique.' My problem was that the pans were sitting right there and the regular guy burns his shit all day long and doesn't care. I do. They were like, "Well, you have all the other guy's pans!" and I was like, "They don't work." Their response: yeah, learn some technique. That was the brand new sous chef, who just got there. Not my regular chef, I was loaned to this guy.

Immensely disrespectful -- I mean, I'd spent two years doing that station and I knew the technique as well as any of the line cooks -- so much so that they moved me from doing 20 dollar omelets to doing tens of thousands of dollars of banquets. Seriously?

Fast forward to the next weekend; we were full up with a bunch of really hungry fratboys doing a conference, and we had baseball all weekend long. That's when it gets really busy, and the normal omelet guy...well, he wanted Sunday off again. They had me scheduled all weekend long, but it went like 12-8pm on Saturday and 6am-2pm on Sunday...and odds are, given the way things were going, I'd be overtiming on Saturday. Well, when I saw I was being turned over off of a busy night in banquets, with very little sleep to handle a fraternity full of fratboys looking for breakfast (same guys we fed last night weren't being fed by Banquets in the morning) and a ball game crowd all brunch long, I replayed the way they treated me in my head and called out as soon as I was off work. I wasn't gonna bust my ass without any sleep on a double-slam shift after that bullshit.

No one questioned it. Well, maybe the sous chef did, but he wasn't in my chain of command. What I did there was send a message to the other cooks that were relying on me-- show some fucking respect or be left to hang, asshole.

That's been my only made-up callout at this job, and there was a point to it.[/hider]