Again, your response shows you missed the message. The lesson wasn't about this particular set of circumstances. Of course it would be trivial to automate this

Again, your response shows you missed the message. The lesson wasn't about this particular set of circumstances. Of course it would be trivial to automate this specific use case. The point is that as a business owner, as the person onto who everything comes down in the end, you sometimes just have to suck it up and do what no salaried person would do. The lesson was: as an employee you can just call somebody and make your sickness their problem (I'm not suggesting that people with cancer can make that somebody else's problem, please no autistic readings of an abstract point). As the boss, the final person responsible, you have nobody to offload things like this to. You just have to find a solution and often that solution is in muscling through the obstacle.