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In 2005, a British travel company said it had come up with an equation to figure out the most depressing day of the year and came to the conclusion that there’s nothing worse than the third Monday in January (which was dubbed “Blue Monday”).
However, this isn’t really the case in the United States, as most people have that day off courtesy of Martin Luther King Jr. With that said, I think most Americans would agree we have our own “Blue Monday” in the form of the day after the Super Bowl.
According to USA Today, almost 14 million people typically call out of work the day after The Big Game thanks to their inability to make responsible decisions the night before, which makes it the most popular sick day of the year.
Of course, the vast majority of people who are “sick” on that day are actually dealing with a crippling hangover, which isn’t exactly considered a legitimate ailment—at least until now.
According to the BBC, a court in Germany recently decided that hangovers qualify as a real, actual illness in a case concerning a company that was peddling a drink the was marketed as a hangover cure.
In the ruling, the court defined an illness as “small or temporary disruptions to the normal state or normal activity of the body,” and as a result, a hangover qualifies because most people don’t have to deal with uncontrollable vomiting and shaking in their “normal state.”
As a result, the unnamed company is no longer allowed to claim their product cures hangovers and ballsy Germans are now allowed to test their luck by informing their boss they’re sick because they went too hard at Oktoberfest.