(I work for a small tech company as an admin and HR assistant. My mom also works for the company, as the HR manager. Once a year, we hold yearly all-hands company meetings in a hotel in some nice location. This year’s meeting takes place in Las Vegas. We have a new employee, Olga, a woman in her mid-twenties who joined the company only a few weeks ago from a branch in Eastern Europe. All names are fake, fake, fake. The meeting goes well, Olga does her own short presentation very professionally, and everyone goes their own way in the evening. I have a quiet night in. The next morning, around nine am, I’m going to breakfast with my parents.)

Mom: “Did you hear what happened?”

Me: “No, what?”

Mom: “I got an email a couple of hours ago from [Another Employee], saying that Olga had an accident and had to be taken to a hospital.”

Me: “Oh, no! What happened?”

Mom: “I wasn’t given much detail, but the email said that she fell and hit her head early this morning. She was taken to an ER with a head injury, was admitted, and was there for hours. She seems to have amnesia.”

Me: “Oh, my God! How did that happen?”

Mom: “I’m not sure; they didn’t give any more detail than that.”

Me: *realizes something* “Wait a second. ‘Early this morning’? That sounds like she went to some bar last night, got completely drunk, and then fell because of that. ‘Early this morning’ probably means one or two am.”

Mom: “No! No way… Really? You think that’s what happened?”

Me: “Yeah, totally.”

Mom: “No. I mean, I’m sure they’d have said something if that was the case. Anyway, Olga seems like such a sensible girl; I’m sure she’s not the type to do that.”

Me: “Okay, sure. Whatever.”

(I really don’t like to make terrible assumptions about people, but I am just going by logic. If, at nine am, Mom got this email a couple hours ago, and it says that Olga’s already been in hospital for several hours at this point, and the accident happened “early this morning,” that means it was barely after midnight. And otherwise, in all likelihood, how could a young woman have “fallen” and gotten a head injury shortly after midnight, on a Friday night, in Las Vegas? Especially without anybody claiming they were mugged or anything like that. The odds of it being anything else but extreme drunkenness are just not high. Some time later:)

Mom: “Olga’s out of the hospital; thankfully the amnesia was only temporary and she seems fine now. The hospital bill was quite high, though, and since she’s a new employee and only recently came to the US, of course she had no insurance yet, so our company had to pay all of her medical bills. But everyone swore to me and [Company CEO] that the accident had absolutely nothing to do with alcohol. Poor Gary, though – he ended up having to accompany her to the hospital and sit there with her all night.”

(“Poor Gary” is one of our long-time and highest-salaried employees, a quite good-looking guy in his early to mid-thirties.)

Mom: “Yes, poor Gary; he’s so harassed. You know how Olga has managed to recently get herself transferred to our lucrative project in the Silicon Valley? Meanwhile, she’s living in San Francisco – where Gary also lives – and she’s making him teach her how to live there, drive her around, and help her with absolutely everything since there’s no one else from the company living there. Poor Gary’s already so busy with work, and Olga’s bothering him with all sorts of nonsense and making him essentially take care of her. I hope he’s not feeling too overburdened.”

(Then, at next year’s all-hands company meeting.)

Mom: “Do you know what I learned about Olga? They swore up and down to me last year that her injury had nothing to do with drinking, but I found out recently from other employees that they were lying their pants off! They went to some Vegas bar late at night, she got severely drunk, she was dancing, and she managed to fall and hit her head on some table or bar end! The company paid so much money for her hospital bills for that! Ugh! If I tell [Company CEO] about this he’ll be spitting mad! Can you believe this?”

Me: *barely managing to keep my face straight* “Really. I’m shocked.”

Mom: “Poor Gary, having to deal with her and all her nonsense…”

(Less than a year later, Poor Gary quit without notice, in the middle of managing an extremely important project for our company, to take a very lucrative management job with a huge Silicon Valley company. Less than a month after that, Olga also quit without notice, abandoning the project on which she was the lead programmer, to take a programmer job with a different Silicon Valley tech giant. This seriously messed up the projects for our company, and our CEO was absolutely furious that they abandoned ship in this way after being treated well, getting high salaries, having Olga’s medical bills paid with no question, and setting her up on a project where the client was paying for nearly all the cost of her food AND her San Francisco apartment’s rent, etc. Not too long after this, I did an Internet search on them out of curiosity, and one of the very first pages that popped up was Olga’s and Poor Gary’s upcoming wedding announcement site, gushing at length and in very saccharine terms about how happy and in love they were and had been ever since they met when Olga first moved to San Francisco. “Poor Gary,” indeed. Terribly harassed, I’m sure.)

(I am 19, and my first job starts me off in a call center that’s notorious for having a high turnover and very strict policies. After training, my trainer gives me my days off and hours.)

Trainer: “You have Tuesday and Wednesday off, and Sunday is a short day. You must call if you’re not going to make it.”

Me: “Tuesday and Wednesday, got it.”

(My supervisor nods in confirmation. I end up going off on that schedule. On Friday, I am pulled into the office.)

Supervisor: “Why did you miss a day?”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Supervisor: “You didn’t come in Tuesday.”

Me: “But that’s my day off. That’s what my trainer said. Here’s the schedule.”

Supervisor: “It’s Wednesday and Thursday. Now, because you have an unexplained absence, we’ll dock your sick days for the rest of the probation period.”

(I had come in Thursday to work, so essentially I still worked the same hours. I tried to show them the schedule I was given, but they refused to look at it. Fast forward about a month: I ended up getting a horrific stomach bug that lasted an entire 48 hours, where I ended up vomiting every three hours or so and thus had no sleep, but since I had lost my sick days, I couldn’t call out. I ended up arriving at work, clearly sick as a dog, exhausted, and then my floor supervisor put me on a computer with a broken headset so I wouldn’t even able to do my job. Without anything to focus on, my exhaustion caught up to me, and I ended up nodding off. I was promptly taken to the office and fired. I ended up throwing up about as soon as I exited the building. Part of me wished I had taken my time so I could’ve vomited on my supervisors.)

Several years ago, my company was looking to hire an intern, and we received an impassioned application from a young woman in her early 20s. She didn’t have much experience, but she seemed driven, smart, and dedicated, and we felt like we could take a chance on her. All of us kind of empathized with being that young person, trying to get a foot in the door and get noticed. The job involved a lot of basic “intern-y” stuff like paperwork and emails and data entry, but also involved attending meetings and check-up calls with our clients, contractors, and so forth, more to take notes or answer basic questions and take information than anything huge or stressful. It was basically a lot of the sort of work that we were desperate for an intern to handle so we could focus more on our bigger projects and our main duties. Since we knew it was a significant amount of work, even if it was mostly made up of a lot of little things, it was paying more than minimum wage.

When we called her in for her interview, she seemed different from her application. She was very quiet, a little awkward, and stumbled through speaking, though we chalked it up to nerves. Because it was only a four-month internship with option for us to hire permanently or “renew” the agreement, it didn’t seem like much of a risk to us, and we decided to hire her. The first few weeks went… okay. She seemed so outgoing in her application and emails when we’d followed up with her, but around the office she was quiet as a mouse and seemed to be trying to actively avoid people, even after extensive training. She did her work quickly and effectively, but any time she had to do something that involved working with her coworkers, or clients, face-to-face, she found some way to get out of it.

Because that sort of thing was in her job description, which she assured us she could do before we hired her, that just wasn’t acceptable. I tried to speak with her privately about it, and she told me she was just not used to dealing with people professionally, and swore she’d get better and try harder. I was not unsympathetic; I might have been ten years or so older than her, but I knew what it was like to be the awkward, anxious gal… Heck, I still am, and get a lot of social anxiety; I’m just better able to hide it and work with it. But as her first month dragged into her second and we didn’t see an improvement, that sympathy turned into frustration; my coworkers and I were left holding the bag for a lot of the duties she was specifically brought on to handle that involve dealing with people in person or over the phone, all because she was uncomfortable or nervous. It got to the point where she was not doing half of what her job required, something that annoyed my boss more and more when he was paying her significantly above minimum wage for an internship, making him feel like she was coasting. We’re a small, tight-knit company and he’s an extremely generous boss, but all of that depends on all of us handling our responsibilities so we can rely on one another.

I pulled her into my office and told her, frankly, that if she couldn’t get around this and we couldn’t find a reasonable solution that didn’t involve her hiding every time she was expected to talk to someone, or coming up with excuses, it was not going to work out and she was going to be let go. She got teary, and then defensive, saying she’d been trying but it was hard, and she just needed us to be a little patient and understanding. At this point, she’d been “trying” for almost two months, and we hadn’t seen even a little progress since the beginning. I told her as gently but firmly as I was able that at the end of the day, this was still a job and we were still a business, and if she literally could not do the job she was specifically hired to do, we’d have to part ways.

The very next day, she was supposed to be sitting in on a meeting with one of our contractors and a coworker, both to take down information to update our system with later, and to get some experience on how these things went so in the future — if she got her act together and was hired on– she could handle them herself, and gain insight and experience into the industry itself. As it was, she’d mostly just gained insight and experience into being your standard office gofer.

Because I was wrapped up in my own work I didn’t get to see this happen, but my coworker came storming back after, angry and embarrassed, because our intern, this adult helping to represent us as a company in a business setting, showed up to this professional meeting in. A. Unicorn. Onesie. I absolutely refused to believe he wasn’t joking until I heard from everyone else. The contractor — who was more confused and made awkward than anything else, and thankfully as understanding as she could be about it — attested to it, including how the intern dragged her chair away from the table and sat in the corner with her head down, taking notes and not speaking, as did everybody else in the office who had seen it. Apparently, she just stood up shortly after she sat down, grabbed her things, and left.

I tried getting a hold of her multiple times, but she ignored all attempts to contact her, even though you could see her on social media out partying with her friends and chatting online. She even went so far as to delete every single reference she had ever posted to working for or with us. Because she still seemed to be active and happy, we just decided to drop it. We never saw her again, but it still remains the single most bizarre experience of my career, maybe even my adult life. All we could guess is that she just got overwhelmed and maybe wore it as some sort of comfort thing, then got embarrassed and fled. I’m still not 100% sure whether it was some elaborate troll, but I honestly can’t figure out what the point would be. I looked her up again recently; she seems happy and healthy, and is working for another company in a completely different industry, so it seems like everything worked out for her. The whole incident was just so strange I wanted to reach out to her and ask her what the hell happened, but ultimately I decided she was probably far more embarrassed by the ordeal than I was impacted by it and let it lie. She seems to be doing very well for herself, and at the end of the day, that’s worth more than my curiosity.

(I have gone into the café my family owns for a quick bite to eat while I’m on break. I have never met the cashier before, so I assume she’s new.)

Cashier: “That’s [amount], please.”

Me: “I also have the family and friends discount. My name is on the records.”

(She rolls her eyes and holds out her hand.)

Cashier: “Nice try. [Amount], please.”

Me: “No. You will get the record book, verify my name — [My Name] — and give me the discount.”

(She looks me up and down, still with her hand out.)

Cashier: “So, what are you supposed to be? Cousin? Daughter? What’s the owner called?”

Me: “That’s none of your business. Please do as I ask and get the record book. Oh, and [Husband].”

(She snorts.)

Cashier: “Impressive. I guess scammers really come prepared these days. You can either pay, or I’ll call security and have you removed.”

Me: “Security? Really? This is a small, family-owned café. We don’t have security.”

Cashier: “No, but I can get the chef. He’s beefy!”

Me: “The only chef here is [Nephew], and he’s so thin a gentle breeze could knock him over. But please, by all means, get him.”

Cashier: “Oh, um… What was your name again?”

(I give her my name again and she leaves for the kitchen. My nephew comes out and makes small talk while applying my discount and getting my change. I see the cashier poking her head above the window in the kitchen door occasionally, and I smile and wave. Later that evening when I get home, my husband talks about her.)

Husband: “She took off with the record book during her first shift. She’s adamant that she didn’t take it, but [Brother-in-Law] saw her stuff it in her bag while he was in.”

Me: “Why the hell haven’t you fired her?”

Husband: “Because I want the book back. She’ll bring it back eventually, and I can guarantee we’ll have more friends in it than before.”

(A few weeks later, the book appeared again, with 62 new names added to it. The cashier tried to act like they had always been there, but the change in handwriting and six of the names having the same surname as her was something she couldn’t argue with. We contacted her parents, who confirmed she had added their names, but under the pretense that it was family and friends of employees who also got the discount. She was promptly fired; however, her parents requested she volunteer to work for us for a month as punishment. My husband agreed and has her working with stock. Our son works in there, so hopefully she won’t think to try anything.)

(My church does live-streams of the services, so they have cameras and sound booths. I want to intern in there, but I know they won’t let me without experience. There are two supervisors with equal power, but they generally never keep things straight with each other. I tell [Boss #1] that [Boss #2] said I could be an intern and tell [Boss #2] that [Boss #1] said that I could. Two months later, I put on my headset before the service starts and I can pick up on a conversation in the other room because the bosses left the microphone on. I hear this gem of a conversation:)

Boss #1: “Wow, [My Name] is picking up on this fast!”

Boss #2: “Yeah, I’m glad you hired her!”

Boss #1: “I thought you did?”

(I never got in trouble, but the awkward silence afterwards was amazing.)