I don’t mean just ‘vanish’, like an egg, a penny, and an elephant in some elaborate conjuring trick, but simply not show up for work one day and never be seen again.
I was a programmer in a small IT shop in the early 1990s, when our technical support person did that. She didn’t show up one day, and nobody heard from her. She never called in. After about 2 weeks she was replaced, but we never did hear what happened.
Have you ever seen this? What could be behind this? And if you’ve seen it, did you get to find out what happened?
I had a classmate disappear once. Not just to us, but to everybody, apparently, such that the police were looking for him and were completely stumped. I never did learn whether he turned up, living or dead. Seemed like a normal, well-balanced kind of guy to me, so hard to believe he just took himself out of circulation.
In my current job, we had a guy join our group back in early August. He never got set up properly in payroll and kept having huge, involved conversations with people at the home office trying to get things set up so he could get paid. After three months, he just stopped coming to work, and we never heard from him again. I asked my HR rep if she knew anything about him the next time I saw her, and she said he just walked away from the company (and probably moved back to Michigan…).
No, but my sister-in-law once had a boyfriend who disappeared. This was when my husband was a kid. The guy was living with them for a while, and was storing a bunch of his stuff in their garage. One day he just left and never came back. He never came back for his stuff either, which was strange. You’d think even if he didn’t want anything to do with her/them, he’d still want his belongings back.
Not exactly the same but we had a new eomployee who was supposed to start. She came in and met all of us and got a few hours of orientation in. Then the weekend came. She was supposed to start on Monday… never saw her again, she wouldnt’ return calls, and we never knew what happened.
We had a poster around here who entertained us with a long drama about her missing co-worker. It was awesome! I wish I could remember who that was. We were on the edge of our seats for a long time!
Yep. I was branch manager of a bank located inside a supermarket. We had a promotional table set up just inside the supermarket’s front doors, out of sight of the branch. Everyone took a shift manning the table throughout the day. I sent one employee (who I’ll call D. B. Cooper) out to man the table when it was his turn. Good guy, had been with us about 6 months. About 30 minutes later my region manager walked in and asked why no one was at the table. I said “D. B. is there, I just sent him out a few minutes ago”. We went and looked, no D. B. Maybe he went to the rest room. Nope. Never heard from him again.
No one knew what happened to the guy, he just stopped showing up for work. The bosses cursed him, called him, left nasty messages on his answering machine, demanding he call them (we were short handed, and the powers that be in that company were dickheads, period - I understand being mad, but these guys turned into hopping mad roosters if they didn’t have you under their thumb). Instead of just replacing him, we heard for months from our supervisors that this guy was a shithead, a bad employee, was going to have a huge black mark on his record, and the nicer ones kind of joked to us that if we ever stepped out of line, we’d disappear like that guy did.
We did eventually find out what happened, though.
He died. He was far away from any family, who he apparently didn’t keep in touch with often, and he was new to the area. Poor soul didn’t have anyone who knew him well enough to check up on him. He’d been dead three days before he was found, and no one informed the company. I don’t know who found him or why, but I’m glad someone did. He’d died in his armchair, apparently from having a massive heart attack. They said his heart was full of small holes, so he must have had heart attacks before, but didn’t realise it.
After that, I get a little paranoid when someone “just disappears”. I hope someone is checking on them.
Not quite the same thing because the disappearance was solved, but several years ago, over a period of about a month, two normally dependable employees in critical jobs didn’t show for work.
They were found dead at their homes, one from diabetes complications and another from a heart condition. They were both in their 40’s. Now that’s the first thing I think of when someone disappears – something awful must have happened.
Please see Oh My! Someone lives in my plow? for an example of someone that disappeared off the face of the earth…only to return a few years later.
If anyone choses to read that long post, go to the second post, someone was kind enough to clean it up for me. BTW as an update, we fired him last week. Hopefully this time we never see him again.
When I worked for the power company one day this guy didn’t show up. We didn’t see him for quite some time, although he did eventually return. While he was gone, a bunch of us were speculating where he might be, and I finally suggested he might be in jail. Everyone kind of raised an eyebrow and got quiet. Apparently it was the most believable theory anyone had come up with. Judging by the lack of explanation by him or by the bosses when he returned, I think he was indeed in the slammer.
Heh. I was the disappearee in one case. My boss and I were had a major personality mismatch and it had been agreed upon that I would resign by the end of the month. (which was the right decision, I stuck it out too long in a miserable situation) Anyway, we had an icestorm here in Austin combined with a holiday, I had four straight days off and I realized I couldn’t bear to deal with the situation at work anymore. That night I went up to the office at midnight and completely emptied my office and left the keys on my desk. It felt great. (but Austin is small, a few weeks later I started working at a different firm so I didn’t stay disappeared)
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I was privy to a disappearance. This goes back a number of years, when I was still in HR. Two men in suits showed up in our lobby and asked to talk to a guy we’d just hired. He came out to greet them, and they arrested him; they were federal agents. No scene, they just whisked him away. We in HR knew what had happened, because we processed his termination, but of course we couldn’t talk about it. We never heard another thing about him after that. So as far as the rest of the company was concerned, he basically vanished in the middle of the work day.
My dad’s coworkers got worried because he didn’t show up for work one morning and didn’t answer the phone, so they went to check on him. He’d died over the weekend. He was 41.
So, yeah, if somebody didn’t show up I’d be worried that something really bad had happened.
Not quite the same, but we had a new employee who drove a restored classic Mustang. On her third day on the job, she went out to lunch and discovered the parking attendants had her car out with the hood up. She delivered a stream of inveective to the attendents, shut the hood, got in her car and drove off. She never came back.
Not only did she not come back, she never answered her phone or returned the messages we left for her. After about three weeks, we sent her a registered letter telling her if she wanted to be paid for the 2 1/2 days she worked for us, she’d have to notify us that she wanted her final check. We got a one-line note from her, sent her paycheck and never heard from her again.
“Charlie” was in his early sixties, a couple of years from retirement. He’d worked at the company forever. He was very personable and cute in an old-guy kind of way, and he liked young women: he had a young wife and a couple of kids still at home, and he was having an affair with a much younger woman at work. One morning Charlie’s manager came in and found a note on her desk that said, “Give my final paycheck to my wife – Charlie”. Charlie has not been seen since.
It was subsequently discovered that he had been planning his disappearance for quite some time. He had heavily mortgaged his house and cleaned out his bank accounts; the wife and kids were left with nothing. Neither the wife nor the girlfriend had any idea that he was preparing to vanish. The girlfriend said that the day before he disappeared she came home and found him trying to push his motorcyle up a ramp onto the bed of his pickup truck. After watching him struggle for awhile, she suggested that he drive the motorcycle onto the truck, which he did. He took off, and that was the last she saw of him. (Incidentally, she claimed that she didn’t know he was married – even though everyone else at work knew he was, and he had photos of the wife and kids on his desk.)
There were rumors that he was cutting a swath through the casinos of the southern states, but nothing was ever substantiated.
At my last job, they hired a young women who ended up only working one day. It’s the tradition at that place for new employees to get a “mentor” who introduces them to the whole office (~50 people) on their first day and helps them fill out all their paperwork. When I met her, she seemed rather standoffish, but I thought perhaps she was just tired or shy or something.
The next morning she did not come in and no one could reach her by phone. I do not remember how they finally tracked her down to get her paycheck to her. One of my coworkers said he felt a little bad, because the previous day he had said to her, “You ought to put up some pictures in your cubicle so we know you’re coming back tomorrow!”
