Back when I was still in the security biz, a bank building would be a seven-days-a-week check, at least twice a night. Every room would be spot-checked and secured. If she was still there Friday afternoon they would have waited until she was gone on Friday then done their rounds.
Another way to tell if your coworkers don't like you: They leave you dead at your desk for four days
Again, I think that’s just sensationalism. I bet they noticed the smell Monday morning. Who is going to initially assume a bad smell is a dead coworker? I bet they smelled something foul, thought it was bad plumbing, and soon after found the woman. I doubt they went days or even hours just ignoring the dead body smell. Dead things smell really bad.
Oh, right. Monday would have been only three days.
Another good point. I thought the smell of decomposing flesh was pretty distinct (I’ve only ever smelled a dead mouse, not a dead person).
She doesn’t seem to have been found until Tuesday afternoon, though.
Ah. Should have ready it more thoroughly. Yea, that’s quite a bit worse!
Yea. That’s pretty wild. I wonder how the layout of the building is. How many doors and walls between the area with her cubicle and that of others? Man . . .
If there were keycards, then the fact that she didn’t check out, indeed couldn’t check out without the card would have immediately alerted someone that someone unauthorized was still there.
The first two days were a weekend with no one there. She worked in an underutilized part of the building & depending upon her cube layout one might be able to walk past & not know if she was there or not because you couldn’t see her seat. I could also see a second person saying, “What’s that smell” & a cow-orker replying that it’s a plumbing problem & me brushing it off & then the longer you’re in an area the more desensitized you become to it so no one would even think about it again on Mon.
I’ve badged in at a bunch of different jobs but I’ve never had one where we badged out.
I had an office for a year that was in a part of a hospital that had been shuttered for financial reasons. The unit where my office was had been a secure psychiatric ward. The only door in latched shut when it closed automatically and could only be opened with a key. The door to my office, where the only telephone was, also swung shut on its own and required a key to open and close. The office had no window. This was before widespread internet availability and there weren’t yet personal cell phones. Nobody was in that part of the building. Maybe once a month, someone came through and emptied the trash in my office. The room to the hallway had a small security window in it, but unless a patient was having a hearing with an administrative law judge in the room next to my ward, which was infrequent, no one else ever came up there. It was super alarming and creepy at times. It seemed to me that I would be in a very dangerous situation if I wound up between those two doors without my keys, so I tried to keep them on a lanyard around my neck at all times. This worked except when I was doing a psych interview or testing or assessment with a patient on a different ward, in which case you don’t want a nice strangling lanyard around your neck and it’s rude to have the keys dangling there when people are locked up against their will.
I work at a simple school, and everyone badges or signs out after plugging in their personal code.
My last job we badged in but not out.
A prior job we just walked in and out, unless we left after 5, in which case we had to sign out. I used to routinely sign out as “Mickey mouse” and no one ever noticed.
My last job only required a key card after hours. My last office was again in an under-inhabited area. If my door were closed, I coulda been dead over there for a week before anyone thought to check.
The dead employee was fortunate that Wells Fargo didn’t dock her pay for being deceased on company time.
Anyway, things could have been worse, like if they didn’t find her for three years.
Our cleaners come on Thursday night.
Where do you work?
My cubical is located in an odd corner and it’s pretty easy for people not to notice me when I’m there. Our janitorial service must be pretty good though because they never fail to empty out my trash even though they have to deliberately seek it out to find it. I could see someone going an entire 3-4 days before being found if the death occurred on a Friday and it was a part of the building many employees aren’t using. I know some of our office space are viritual ghost towns unless everyone has been called into the office for some reason.
As far as badges go, I’ve never worked at a location where I was required to scan to get out. Technically I need to scan to get out of the parking garage, and while those scans are recorded, nobody’s really keeping an eye on it manually. i.e. Nobody is going to notice if I didn’t scan to get out though I imagine someone might see my vehicle. But they probably wouldn’t care if it was there over the weekend as sometimes employees might leave them there while going on a business trip or something.
A medical device lab open M-F.
Not Wells Fargo.
Wait, wait…did she not have 1 family member who noticed she wasn’t home? A neighbor, a friend, the dog barking his head off? The car not in the drive? Her church? Not ONE person, outside the place of work?
What is wrong with this picture?
Oh, and the smell was probably poop, from her. I believe it happens spontaneously when you die from certain things.
The smell of a decomposing body is pretty unmistakable; nothing like poop.
The only good thing about WF is that I got some money from them for a class action lawsuit regarding fraudulent accounts. I thought the letters were junk mail, but when I learned otherwise, I called a 1-800 number and gave them my name, and a few months later, I got two checks in the mail that added up to a few hundred dollars.
This happened a couple years ago.