In early 2021, [contagious illness] was in the midst of ravaging the world, and the vaccine, though in existence, was not widely available yet anywhere. It was also during then that the virus was thought to reside in a dormant state for days on everything an infected person touched.
Our front receptionist had recently moved to another state, so we needed a new one. After a short hiring process, we got someone, a young woman. During the interview, she had shown a negative [illness] test. (A positive one would not disqualify someone; if they WERE the best candidate, we’d wait two weeks and bring them in. Various other people could fill in the receptionist duties in the meantime. It was more stressful than normal, but we could go for two weeks.) She would immediately begin on Monday, and people would train her on what to do and how things worked in this office.
[New Hire] had a quiet and reserved demeanor, so nobody who shadowed her, teaching her how to do things, thought much of her when she would seem to have problems understanding concepts. It would take upwards of an hour for her to pick up any concepts, so training sessions would take an entire half of a day per person. She would also request to go into their offices to ask questions.
I was not one of the people who trained [New Hire], however, as my work was entirely different from hers, though my workspace was about fifteen feet (about four and a half meters) away from her and was the closest one, and we both shared the same large open-plan room.
Once she was finished with her training, which took about three days, she turned on the radio in this room. Ordinarily, it’s on a top-forty station, but she changed it to a talk radio station that was, for a lack of a better word, extremist. The hosts were racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, and full of conspiracy theories. As the January 6th riots were very recent, they had much to say about them that I will only say was making my blood boil.
Though I believe everyone has a right to their opinion and to share it peacefully, the more I had to hear that talk radio, the more maddening it was. But I figured that if this was what [New Hire] genuinely believed, I was not going to prevent her from hearing it, so I bore with it, especially since she didn’t come across as violent. Other people walking by would change the radio back to the top-forty station, but after they left, she would change it back to the talk radio station.
Every now and then, everyone in the office would go and take a test for [illness]. For the most part, either nobody would test positive, or only one or two would, and they’d stay home for two weeks. This time, on Friday, about half the office tested positive. [New Hire], meanwhile, reported back that her test was “inconclusive”, but she wouldn’t show the results.
The owner felt suspicious about this, and he coaxed [New Hire] into showing the real, unaltered results, showing she was positive. He confronted her about it online and asked why she lied about her test results twice. When she couldn’t provide any good answer, she was fired immediately. Contact tracing officials determined that she was the source of the outbreak in the office, and it made sense; everyone who caught it either worked with her directly, touched things she touched (like the radio), or stayed in close proximity to someone who had caught it for an extended amount of time.
I was spared; my test came up negative, which I presume is because I never interacted with her besides talking to her from across the room, nor did I touch anything she did. However, because so much of the office staff tested positive, they had to quarantine for two weeks, so the following two weeks were the toughest stretch I had ever worked in that office due to being so insanely short-staffed.
Meanwhile, we discovered that while [New Hire] packed up her own valuables when she was fired, she left other various things behind, lying out in the open: a half-empty bottle of water, an unopened packet of peanut butter cups, a somewhat-used bottle of perfume, a box of tea bags, and a few other items that wouldn’t be missed. I was told to put it all in a box for her to claim if she wanted, though I was supposed to wait a week to minimize the risk of getting infected by touching her belongings. For the following few weeks, I repeatedly tried to contact her and let her know that we’d boxed up her belongings and that she could claim them, but she never responded, nor did she show up. After two months, we disposed of them.
In hindsight, a lot of the other people around the office and I believe that, as an asymptomatic carrier, she had tried to deliberately spread [illness] around the office. She acted to maximize her time close to other people, she attempted to bait me into touching things she touched, she likely spoke softly and quietly to get people to come closer to her so she could hear her, and once she had to leave, she left a bunch of her things behind that she wouldn’t claim as one last attempt to infect somebody — either me, someone who had to pick up her things, or the next receptionist.
I would really like to give her the benefit of the doubt and say she was a slow learner and was influenced by other figures in her life in certain ways, but I have a hard time believing any of that. But I really hope that was the case, as the alternative — to spread [illness] around deliberately and maliciously — boggles the mind.
