Only on the Dope would this get corrected. 
I love you, Walloon, and I love this place. I actually knew about that tidbit, but the romantic character in my mind’s eye is DB Cooper. Much more bad-ass sounding. Like he’s so evil that not even Chuck Norris would say his first name!
Not exactly a complete disappear, but when we were on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, there was a guy who came to the island as a new hire from the Boston area in mid-winter. He arrived in the wet-horse-blanket humidity, high temps and fry-your-eyes-out higher UV index from something like single digit temps.
Guy stayed in the airport until the next departing flight. Never set foot outside the airport. Never cleared security. He became sort of a legend on the island.
The HR manager at our plant pulled a no-show. He was very antisocial and not well liked (yet, went into HR), and had been cornering people in the mailroom mumbling about how “they” wanted him to resign so “they” could replace him.
One day he just didn’t show up for work ever again. He didn’t really have any personal stuff in his office, and since our paychecks are direct deposit, we guessed he figured he didn’t need to leave word. It took corporate a couple of days fielding peoples’ calls on benefits to realize he wasn’t coming back. Fortunately, “they” have now replaced him.
I also had a friend who we learned had died when his work checked in on him. He was a psych professor in upstate New York, single and lived alone. He had visited here over the holidays between semesters, then gone back but never shown up for classes. They found his apartment a shambles – multiple days’ groceries still unpacked, tons of change stacked everywhere – which was very out of character for him.
Turned out he had developed Type II diabetes, never diagnosed. His blood sugar got so off that he wasn’t thinking straight for several days, until he just slipped into a coma. When I first heard the story, I was relieved to hear that it was the police who’d found him; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to find a coworker or friend like that.
The dangers of Polish girls.
I had a coworker in the early '90s that was also a certified parachute instructor. Living in Saudi he didn’t have any opportunity to practice his sport and was always going home to the UK to do some jumps.
The last time I saw him was at the airport where I was seeing him off to go to Poland for some kind of parachute party. He had a huge suitcase full of blue jeans. According to him, “Polish girls will do anything for a pair of jeans.”
We never saw him agan. His mother called looking for him, we wanted to pay him and ship his personal effects etc. AFAIK, no one from his old life ever saw him again and there were no records of anyone dying at the jump meet so that wasn’t it.
I figure the Polish girls got him.
Testy
I found out after the fact that I was considered a “missing employee”. I was working in an office in NYC for three insane brothers (I could tell you some wild stories about them) who owned a large import/export business. I had worked there for about two years and decided to leave NYC and move to Berlin, so I told one of the insane owners that Friday would be my last day. We talked for awhile, I told him I was moving to Berlin and he said, “let’s just keep this between us. We have to fire someone Friday and it will look bad if you are quitting and we have to fire someone to cut staff on the same day.” So I didn’t tell anyone…not like I was particularly close to anyone working there, but probably would have normally said something to a few people. But didn’t say anything, got my pay on Friday and left.
At any rate, I moved to Berlin and it was a few months later that a friend from NYC called and said the police had called to check on my whereabouts. Seems the insane brother had totally forgotten I had gone in to give notice, and after I didn’t show up, they tried to reach me. Of course, my phone had been disconnected and they didn’t have any way to reach me so they sent a few letters that came back and finally one of the other brothers got worried and contacted the police. They contacted my old apartment. I hadn’t left a forwarding address as the only mail I ever got was bills, and my family and friends knew I was moving. The police got the name of the person I used as a reference and contacted her. Needless to say, she was surprised I was “missing” as she and I kept in regular contact.
Most likely the owner I spoke to had totally forgotten I had gone in and told him I was leaving…he had the attention span of a fruit fly, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
It used to happen all the time when I was in the Navy. They got tired of putting up with the BS and went home.
A woman I once worked with disappeared right in the middle of the morning on an otherwise same-old type of day. This was from the reservations-floor (think call-center) of a very large corporate travel agency. Her desk-space was literally in the middle of the office.
About 10am, she semi-loudly made a remark that she was “going downstairs for coffee” and asked if anyone else wanted some.
After about a half-hour, there were some mumbling about where she was.
I went to her desk-space and made the observation that there were now no personal items at all left behind. And she had the reputation of being some sort of pack-rat at work. Pictures on her desktop and walls, cartoons, toys, figurines, extra pair of shoes, ramen noodles in the drawers… you get the picture.
Then it occurred to me that a few days earlier, I’d heard our manager make a comment to her about how her desk-space was looking a lot tidier.
Seems she’d probably been planning this disappearance-act for quite some time.
I guess it’s a good thing that no one had taken her up on the offer for coffee.
So what was the reason for his arrest? Curious minds want to know.
When I worked in retail at a well-known office supply store, a fellow employee one morning told me he was going to Starbucks and would be gone for a few minutes. Thinking nothing of it, I said, “okay, no problem.” After 20 minutes had passed I figured he should be back by now. By the time an hour had passed we figured he wasn’t coming back at all. I never saw the guy again myself, no word on whether or not he ever made an appearance again. From this day on we referred to anyone who went AWOL as having “gone to Starbucks.”
Those Navy boys must have been good swimmers.
I wish I could garnish the story with more details, but all I know is that a professor at the uni’ here where I work was last seen driving away from work one evening and his car found later on the North Antrim coast, sans driver.
The tides along this coast are notorious for whipping people out to sea and it could have been that whether he wanted to or not, a quick nip turned into a long long swim…
That, we never found out. The most I can tell you is that the federal agents were apparently ATF. So he was either running moonshine, dealing in arms, or lighting fuse in hand and failing to get away.
Heh. I might be one of them, actually. Before I got my current job, I worked for about three and a half days for one of the biggest personal injury lawyers in the city. I hated it, and I had already interviewed for my current job by the time I started there. So, when my current employer called on Thursday of the weed I’d started there and offered me more money, more reasonable hours, and benefits, I jumped on it, told my boss I had a better offer, and walked.
I had a sociology professor in junior college who was the nicest older guy in the world, but somehow, every single topic every single day somehow came around to world war II. We’d start in on the discussion of the previous day’s reading, but within 15 minutes it would somehow segue into world war II. At this same time I had just been working in adult care, and guessed that he was suffering from some mild manifestation of dementia. Sure enough one day about half way through the quarter, no more professor. He didn’t show up for three days.
On the fourth day we came into an entirely new gentleman sitting at his desk. He explained that the former professor had completely disappeared from his home, everything was gone, along with his grade books. Since it was so late in the class and they had no idea how to base our grades, the entire class was given A’s, and we spent the rest of the class talking about oncology, which is what this new guy did for a living.
A guy called Wally. He’s not the board’s Wally, but a Wally none the less. Wally seemed permently impared mentaly by his excesses over the years. His life revolved around booze, whores, and owing people money. He went to see someone over a 4 day company holiday, and didn’t show up for work. A couple days after he should have been back, the owner started looking for him. She found that he was in jail for incidents in the state he visited, that had warrants awaiting his return. He was gone 2 weeks without anybody in the area knowing where he was. A few months later I took him to his motel room after his shift, and he couldn’t remember parking his van at the bottom of the parking lot. Too bad he had left it out of gear, with no brake applied the day before. It had come to rest in a parking space at the bottom of the incline, without causing an accident. Later on he killed himself during a weekend drinking binge, which is sad, but all life stories aren’t happy ones, and some people don’t have anyone to tell their story in the end.
I had the same thing happen to me in your current location. I was working in a restaurant as a dishwasher while I went to school, and I went on vacation over xmas break. When I came back, the place was closed without warning, though they did mail me my last paycheck eventually. I happened to run into some other former employees around campus though, and apparently the place closed down due to money issues or what not, and rather than giving any warning the management waited till the last day they were open and then told all the employees. I can’t remember if was before or after christmas day, but it was pretty close to it either way.
Hey, that happens sometimes. I used to work for the Navy, and a coworker who was a Navy diver told me that they’d had a guy who jumped off the ship he was on twice in one day. He’d been called to help get the guy out of the water the first time, and someone made the mistake of letting go of him once he was back on the ship - he just ran right out and jumped off the deck again. They’d just been in the Phillippines and apparently he really, really wanted to go back. Needless to day he was sent for a psychiatric exam.
I worked for a shore command and I remember a case where a guy just didn’t show up for work anymore and someone from the command was assigned to put his stuff in a box and send it to the guy’s family. I thought that was weird, because it was a training command and not exactly hard duty.
The weirdest Navy story, though, was the guy who left and then came back … my husband was stationed on the Roosevelt for several years, and one day when he was on watch, a watch sailor came up to him and said there was a guy who had approached the brow and said he was UA (UA = AWOL). So my husband asks,
“How long’s he been gone?”
“Four years, sir.”
“Uh, he’s not UA, he’s a deserter. Call the Master at Arms.”
WTF?
My friend worked with this older woman who went missing one day. After not showing up to work for several days, they finally asked her daughter to investigate. She was found in her back garden digging a giant hole. When asked what she was doing, she very matter-of-factly responded with, “I am going to go back into the earth.”
Horrified by her mother’s behavior, she took her into hospital where it turned out she had a salt imbalance.
I heard this one second hand since it happened before I was hired where I work now.
The delivery guy had been working here for a couple months. Sometimes running late, but reliable enough. One day, he went out with a delivery to just one customer. The customer called and said he never showed. No one could find him, or the delivery van. A few days later, the police called the company and told them to remove their van from another company’s property. When they got there, they discovered that the van had hit a pole, and there was a spilled liquor bottle and a little bit of blood on the seat. The door was left open, and the customer’s delivery was sitting in the back, untouched. Turns out the guy was driving without a license since it had been suspended due to DUI. I guess he didn’t want to face the music and fled.
(Bolding added)
And you didn’t like working there?
We just had one. She’d been around for several months, mostly coming in a couple of times a week to look after the frogs and small turtles. Our secretary quit, so this girl went in on the Friday to ask the boss if she could have the job. Was all eager and happy, hated the full time job she had and loved the idea of working full time at the zoo. Monday morning, no girl.
Never came back, no call, not answering the phone, nothing.