An intensive study of sickness absence in a large pottery factory shows that shop floor workers take time off in cycles, some familiar, some less often noticed. The author and his colleagues combined use of company records on absence and sickness with participant observation, and also interviewed a stratified random sample of employees. This paper uses material about the social meanings of time discipline, absence and sickness at work to throw some new light on cycles of absence. It is shown that there are different distributions by day of week for unexcused and excused absences; that there is a complex seasonal distribution, linked to holidays, which differs for men and women; and that the distribution of absences across the working life does not conform to the tendency of people to report a greater degree of incapacity as they age. Qualitative data suggest that men and women of differing age and marital status behave as household and kin relations demand. It is thus unsatisfactory to account for cycles of sickness absence in terms either of individual attitudes to work (‘malingering’) or of the direct impact of biomedical conditions (‘genuine sickness’). What the meanings behind the cycles reveal is that sickness absence is a structured social process.