YOUR own stories of missing co-workers

[ioioio]

My co-worker was a male, probably in his late 50s. He left his wife & a couple of kids and moved in with a female coworker. After about 8 months, he disappeared, leaving only a note on his manager’s desk that said, “Give my last paycheck to my wife”.

Female coworker apparently had no idea he was leaving or where he went. She said that the day before he left, he was trying to push his motorcyle up a ramp onto his truck; after watching him struggle for awhile, she suggested that he drive the motorcyle up the ramp, which he did. Next day he, the truck, and the bike were gone.

A manager told me that the guy appeared to have been planning his exit for years. His house was mortgaged to the hilt, leaving the wife & kids in bad shape. He had liquidated & withdrawn most of his assets. An investigation picked up a trail of credit card usage in casinos, but that ended, and he hasn’t been heard from since.

It was odd for him to leave this way because he could’ve taken early retirement and then done whatever he wanted to, living off a nice pension and 401K.

[ivylass]

*Originally posted by deb2world *
**A few years back a woman who works at my company went missing. After an extensive search with much manpower, they finally found her after about a week. She had been stuffed in the trunk of her car murdered. The car was parked in the company parking lot. About a year later, they arrest her husband for her murder. He also works for our company. Not very many questions were forthcoming since the whole thing was hushed up.

**

This sounds very much like something that happened here in the Orlando area. The wife and the husband didn’t by chance have the same first name, did they?

[Aguecheek]

Originally posted by rjk**
Here in BC, we had a woman on the temp list at work who was apparently not too happy with the amount of work she was getting. Immediately after 9/11, she passed the word that her daughter had been caught in one of the buildings, so she had to go to New York, but had no money for the fare. The college set up a donation fund to get her a plane ticket (and lots of money left over). A few days after she left, we heard from her daughter, living peacefully at home in Winnipeg. I never heard of any further contact with her.**

I’d thought I’d seen that before! At http://www.snopes.com/rumors/sympathy.htm, they mention it on a page about people who made false claims regarding the WTC disaster:

Maureen Curry of Surrey, British Columbia, used the disaster to scam money from her employers and a member of the British Columbia legislature. She claimed her daughter had died in the tragedy and that she needed to be at her grieving grandchildren’s side in this the hour of their loss but lacked the funds to travel to Winnipeg. She was provided with $2,400 to assist her.

Curry’s daughter, Carolyn Burdz, is alive and living in Winnipeg. She has never been to New York City, and thus dismisses all claims that she died there.

Maureen Curry has since disappeared.

[deb2world]

*Originally posted by ivylass *
**This sounds very much like something that happened here in the Orlando area. The wife and the husband didn’t by chance have the same first name, did they? **

Nope it was in California. Obvious neither man didn’t had an original idea on how to do in his wife.

I am really enjoying these stories.

[lisacurl]

She was 11 and rode on the bus with me and we’d sit together and talk. She was a bit odd, I remember. One day she wasn’t there anymore. Or the next day or the next. She never came back to camp. After a couple of days I asked the bus driver what happened to her and he said he had no clue and it was being investigated. When I asked what he meant he said he went to pick her up the first day she vanished and HER ENTIRE HOUSE WAS GONE. I still wonder about that.

AcrosstheSea, you went to camp with a ghost! :eek:

[Bren_Cameron_1]

Mine isn’t very lurid. We had a waiter who was a hard worker and great with the customers. He had a friend who wanted a job, and we needed a busboy. He came in for an interview, was told the job and the wages, and hired.

He spent two days standing at the end of the dining room with a bored expression while dirty dishes overflowed the tables. I and the other supervisor had to tell him constantly, “go clear the dirty dishes off that table.” He would give an exasperated sigh and slouch off to the table and slowly move each dish, each glass, each piece of flatware, individually onto the tray. I swear it took him five minutes to clear a table of two. At first I thougt it was just inexperience–I’ve seen harder cases turn out to be great workers, once they got the hang of things, and I was trying to be patient, and instruct rather than lose my temper, but I fear I was a bit impatient by the end of the first shift. Finally, in the middle of the second day, the hundredth time I’d had to tell him to do his job, he said “I don’t get paid enough for this work.” I reminded him he’d agreed to the wages only a few days before and besides, he hadn’t done much work yet that I’d seen. He finished the shift slouching and sighing.

The next day he didn’t show, and didn’t answer his phone. His friend, the good waiter, wasn’t scheduled that day and I called him. “Oh,” he said, “he hates the job because it’s too much work, and he thought if he didn’t come in you would forget about him. I tried to explain that he could just quit if he didn’t want the job, but he won’t listen to me.” Then he apologized, and said he had no idea his friend was so lazy.

[CrankyAsAnOldMan]

Well, we hired this woman, Angie, about five years ago. She was very private about her personal life, which is unusual for our office, but we respected it. We’re talking P.O. Box for her address, no idea what her husband’s name is, stuff like that. It turns out she was expecting when hired, too, though she was due a month later than me.

Unfortunately Angie got into a car accident when on vacation. She didn’t lose the baby, but she was out for a while, to take it easy. But when she was cleared to come back, she just didn’t. No call. No note. No word.

My office made attempts to contact her, but I don’t think they were successful. It turns out Angie had her baby just about the same time I did (I think our hospital stays overlapped). In my case, I called them when I was going to the hospital, and made sure the office knew as soon as my son was born. I remember giving instructions over the phone, from my hospital bed, to make sure they could find all the files for my projects and nothing would slip through the cracks. They traded off bringing dinner to my house for the next week, and my boss’ boss came over to rock the baby on her night of cooking so we could eat in peace. That’s the kind of office we are. But with Angie, they only heard about her birth through the grapevine (I assume she also notified them through formal channels to file papers for her leave). Finally, somehow, after her usual six weeks of leave, she contacted the office to say she was quitting. My boss didn’t think we should pay her for her maternity leave and I believe there was some wrangling about that but we prevailed.

When they went through her office they find work that was undone, files that she had hidden away so my boss would think the tasks were completed.

In retrospect, it was sort of creepy. I mean, at first I thought it was sad, that her desire for privacy or a firm separation between work and homelife meant that she didn’t get the take advantage of the fabulous support my office lends. But after I found out about the hidden files, I decided she was just a weasel.

[rjk]

Thanks, Aguecheek! I’d forgotten she made it into Snopes (even though it’s a dubious distinction in this case).

[Incubus]

At the plastics company I worked at 2 summers ago, the shipping and receiving guy had to go to the hospital because of a kidney stone. He never came back. I have no idea if he was okay…(I cant imagine anybody dying of a kidney stone- complications maybe?)

I’d feel bad if anything did happen to him, because he had a wife and kid, and they’d come by every day during his lunch hour and spend time with him.

[Quasimodem]

One of the nurses I work with (a former high school class-mate) got really horny one night and wanted to be with her boyfriend. So she thought she’d get sent home if she faked a grand mal seizure.

She did, and they admitted her ass for 24 hour obs. I learned about it later from her best friend.

I still crack up about that! Serves her right!

Q

[ivylass]

We had a temp receptionist who had applied for the full-time position. It was part of my job to fill in for the temp when she was at lunch, so I would go up and relieve her so she could eat.

My boss told her she wasn’t getting the position. She seemed okay with it, and left for lunch.

She didn’t come back at her scheduled time, and I called the temp agency. They told me that she had told them my boss had told her she could run a little late because she had some errands to run.

3pm rolls around, my work is piling up because I can’t get back to my desk, and my boss finally gets out of her meeting. I asked her if she’d told the temp she could come back late from lunch. She told me she hadn’t, and gets on the phone with the temp agency. We basically fired them for fobbing such an unprofessional worker on us. This was the same agency that called another temp at our work, told her that they had another job for her to do that afternoon and didn’t tell us. We found out about it when she told us she wouldn’t be back from lunch.

[tolyri]

I worked at a record store for a while. It was a brand new mall store with one manager and 5 employees. Originally we were all promised 40 hrs a week, but when sales didn’t pan out we all got cut to about 25. One day, about a week before Christmas, the guy I was on shift with had his girlfriend visit him at work. He told me he was going on break and never returned. He was on register that day and I had to take over. My boss was extremly anal about touching other people’s registers, so I got reamed and he disappeared. I offered to take over his hours, knowing that they were having trouble making payroll and it would be cheaper for them to not have to pay another insurance premium. The next day I was asked to train the new guy. I became the missing coworker on Christmas Eve. I kept the shirt and never picked up my last check.