Is There Anyone Still At Their Desk At The End Of August?

When pressed for duty, New Yorkers find a way to call out sick:

On Wednesday morning, a pair of women in shorts and tank tops sat on the No. 7 train as it ran from Grand Central to Flushing. They were also AWOL, more or less, and they were planning to watch “a friend of a friend of mine from London who’s playing Rafael Nadal today,” said one of them, Jamie Lewis, 31.

“I sent an e-mail to my boss at midnight, said I’ll be out tomorrow and you can reach me on my cell, and turned my computer off. The markets are crazy and I work at a hedge fund, so I thought I’d escape.”

Ms. Lewis’s friend, who identified herself as Patricia, said she works for an Internet company and added, “I called in sick. Can’t you tell?” She held the back of her hand against her forehead. “I canceled some meetings.”

Others were at Flushing Meadows by dint of a range of alibis and measures, and a lot of these involved the notion that because they were using corporate seats, or accepting the tickets as a gift from clients, or bringing clients, it counted as work anyway.

One man in shorts and loafers gestured to the young woman beside him on the No. 7 train and said that they both worked for banks, “and she’s my client.” This explained his declaration that the Open “is a good corporate event,” but not the fact that he was hugging and kissing the woman throughout the train ride.

Colleen Channer and a friend, who were watching the Nathalie Dechy-Francesca Schiavone match from an upper row of Louis Armstrong Stadium, the better to simultaneously keep an eye on the match between David Nalbandian and Ivan Navarro-Pastor on the adjacent grandstand court, said that she had taken a vacation from her job at a law firm. “But I have a friend who’s an I.T. guy who told his boss last year that he was running a new program, and then he put the program up and came to the Open the rest of the day,” she said.