Oh, Canada! What are you doing? We turn to you for cheap prescription drugs and commonsense and then you do this.

Silencing people’s “CrackBerries” will not create work-life balance. Even a well-meaning rule, like a BlackBerry blackout from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and on weekends and holidays, is still a rule. And it’s the rules of the workplace (7:59 am is “early” while 8:01 is “late”) that are killing us.

This policy also makes a fatal assumption about work: that work happens at a specific place (the office) or when doing certain activities (using your WhateverBerry). Instead, we’d like people to start thinking about work in terms of what it really is: a state of mind.

If you’re sitting on a beach and you’re working through a problem you’re having on a project, then you’re working. On the other hand if you’re in your cube zoning out and wondering about who’s your favorite American Gladiator, then you’re not working.

In a Results-Only Work Environment, we don’t make any assumptions about what work looks like. As long as people get results, they can work in a cube or they can work on the beach. They get to define what balance means to them. They achieve that balance because they have the power to do so.

In our last post, did we say Tom Brady? Of course, we meant Eli Manning.

Question: Did last night’s upset lead to an increase in lateness and absenteeism today or a decrease? And what about how awful the Super Bowl ads were this year? Did the astoundingly crappy ads (more talking babies!) affect attendance? Workforce Institute, can you please get on that? (We’re just teasing. We appreciate your picking up our post and we’ll try not to freak out on you so much next time.)

Correction number two is less of a correction, and more of an adjustment. As much as we loved the Sad Cubicle Man on the old cover of our book, we’re much more excited about the crispness of the new cover. We’ve been doing our best not to have this be a promo blog, but we thought we’d take a moment to announce that the book is in the can and on schedule to come out in early May. We encourage everyone to read it, provided of course that it doesn’t make you late for work.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, we saw this one coming. The Workforce Institute conducts a survey and not surprisingly finds that “4.4 million employees may arrive late to work on Monday morning after the Super Bowl, and an additional 1.5 million may call in sick. Super Bowl-related absences could be highest for organizations with a high population of Gen X and Gen Y employees.”

We hear this and think, Big deal. People come in late or not at all, for all kinds of reasons, every day, all around the world. And yet somehow the wheels of commerce keep turning. In a way, it doesn’t matter if you have a “good excuse” or you’re “blowing off” work. You’re not there and as a result, people have to adjust. Then the next day it might be your turn to cover for someone else.

But the Workforce Institute gets all hall monitor about it. Invoking the coming recession they note that:

“Super Bowl or not, those workers thinking about blowing off Monday might want to think twice about the message they could be sending to employers who may be managing tighter workforce budgets.”

That’s just ridiculous. If (heaven forbid) you’re going to get laid off in the coming months, it won’t be because you were up all night being happy for Tom Brady. Companies don’t close plants and outsource work overseas because you have a life outside of work. Don’t buy into the “better look busy, the economy’s bad” mentality. Putting on a show of work doesn’t help anyone.

Love stinks. Or maybe love bites. Or maybe love does something else to you. In any case, a marketing company in Japan is now offering “heartache leave” for employees who are facing a sudden increase in “me time”.

The amount of heartache leave you’re eligible to take is scaled according to your age. If you’re under 24 years old, you can take one day off a year. Staffers aged 25 to 29 are allowed two days a year, while employees 30 on up get three days off a year.

As CEO Miki Hiradate says, “Women in their 20s can find their next love quickly, but it’s tougher for women in their 30s, and their break-ups tend to be more serious.”

It all sounds so . . . reasonable.