Struggling at work.

[Ben Davis]

People are always calling out.

Are you saying that people are abusing sick leave or are you having trouble with people who have authentic reasons for absence?

I never call out.

Then you might not be taking care of yourself properly! Do you work through sickness or are you just lucky enough to almost never fall ill?

What happens?

When someone calls out, those of us who are available there to work have to compensate for those who are not there.

As a Business Analyst, I can tell you that it's common for companies to fail to address this situation properly. It stems from the erroneous belief that people are a resource cost to be minimised and not an investment who's return should be maximised. Resource capacity calculations (how many people you need to do the work) should cater for the entire process, including allowances for sickness, holiday, family leave etc. or else business demands can't be met. Expert analysis demonstrates that companies who restrict leave, through 'command & control' style absence management, have a worse business performance than those who fully capacitise for and progressively manage absence. What's happening to you is that your bosses are letting you down, not those who are taking leave (unless they're pulling sickies but even that might be a symptom of poor resource planing).

We are not getting paid more to do our job plus an extra person's job.  No, the company expects that we should just willlingly cover that job, doing more work than one person should handle.

And that's exactly how I'd expect you to feel given your boss' failure.

Here I am, going out of my mind.

You could raise an issue, asking for more people to be brought in. It depends on your relationship with management and how you think they'd react to constructive criticism. Since you feel so strongly about this, doing nothing will probably make you feel worse.