“Well, Ya Got Me. By All Accounts, It Doesn’t Make Sense.”

Years ago, I had a coworker in my office who always seemed to have some kind of drama going on. Frequently, she was absent from work or would be in the manager’s office for hours each day sobbing about what was going on.

Here’s a list of different things she was apparently experiencing:

1. One week, she claimed her brother had gone missing and that her family was “beside themselves with worry”.
2. A week later, she claimed her mother had been rushed to the hospital and needed major heart surgery.
3. She claimed her husband was being abusive to her, but she couldn’t tell anyone in her family because, apparently, it was a secret marriage that her family could never know about.

Oddly, whenever she would mention these apparently distressing events, she would stop talking about them shortly after and never bring them up again. Whenever we would ask her how she was doing or about any of the situations, she would be very evasive or just change the subject.

One week, our manager informed us that this person would be off work sick for an undetermined length of time for “personal reasons”. We later found that she had called up and told our manager that she had just voluntarily committed herself to a mental health facility; otherwise, she would have been sectioned under the mental health act. We felt bad for this girl because, clearly, she was having a hard time, and we never want to see anyone struggle that badly. For months, we picked up the slack and got her work done. People from the office were checking in with her and hoped she would recover soon. Then, this bombshell happened…

I came to work one day after being off the previous day. One of my coworkers came up to me and told me the following in total disbelief.

Coworker: “Hey, [My Name], you won’t believe who I found working at the checkout at [Supermarket]! Well, it was [Sick Coworker]!”

Me: “Sorry… what?”

Coworker: “Yeah, it appears that all this time, she’s been working while was off sick from this place!”

Me: “You’re kidding me! Wait a second… Don’t we have a [Supermarket] right around the corner from here?”

Coworker: “Yup! That’s where I found her! You should’ve seen the look on her face. She saw me, got that deer-in-the-headlights look, and then ran off to the back! She apparently thought it was a smart idea to work right opposite the place she was scamming!”

Everyone in the office was a mixture of extremely upset and baffled. Apparently, one of the senior managers went down there and confronted her and told her under no certain terms that she was sacked immediately. We later found out that the company had reported her for benefit fraud.

The funniest part is that she apparently demanded that we give her a good reference when she was applying for new jobs. From what I heard, our manager gave her a reference, but it wasn’t a glowing one. 

Many of our coworkers have since said that, looking back, a lot of things about her stories just didn’t add up or that more questions should have been asked by management. I still don’t understand what was going through her head the entire time.