I worked with someone who did this. It was the HR person. She just didn’t show up one day, didn’t answer her phone or door. For a solid week. After a wellness check by the police, it was revealed that she was fine, just couldn’t go back in to work because she hated her job so much.
I was young, and it was a shitty grocery chain filled with shitty management and shitty customers. I 100% thought she had killed herself, or skipped town for some other awful reason. It was a relief to hear she was OK. Fuck that store.
That reminds me when I missed the first day of teaching because of a really bad flu causing me to lose track of the dates, I got a very concerned call from my advisor who thought I offed myself. Apparently not too uncommon for underpaid adjunct professors, unfortunately.
When I was in grad school I knew a guy who just simply didn’t teach for half the semester. No contact with students, no classes held, just didn’t show. He gave everyone a passing grade on the midterm and came back halfway through. No explanation. He was not fired. Of course, like the rest of us, he was grossly underpaid and didn’t have health insurance. I guess they get what they get if they’re gonna treat us like cogs, right?
Sometimes I wonder how people get away with stuff like this. I recall that story from Spain, I think, where a guy was getting a paycheck for like 20 years but not working at all. I guess they did a reorg and his new ‘boss’ didn’t know about him and he never got work assigned and he just stopped showing up…for years.
It has to be a pointless job to start with, right? If I just didn’t work at my job for a week it would probably get noticed. If I no-showed completely it certainly would.
I’d probably be given the benefit of the doubt for a few weeks if I just stopped producing work. I could maybe make it a month before someone said something about my performance but only because sometimes the things I work on take a while to come to fruition. And missing meetings isn’t uncommon because of conflicts/being super busy.
Id probably also get the benefit of the doubt if I no-showed too. But after a two days they’d call my wife or come by my house, or send the police department to my house to check on me.
This is advanced ghosting.
It’s proactive.
I ghost people before they even don’t give me their number.
I ran away from my site like this one day. I was working as an Engineer Trainee. No one gave a damn. Eventually, I returned after a month or so. Resigned in less than one month after returning. Man, I hate this country with a passion where you are not even treated as a human being, but as a machine.
Just show up at your own wake like Beerfest and everything will be fine.
R.i.p anon your green text will be remembered
Burnout
I had an assistant who didn’t really need the job, but her parents forced her to have one. She was the youngest, and only girl, of a family of 5 siblings. All her older brothers worked at the race track that their family owned, and she was dating someone they didn’t approve of. I liked her boyfriend, he seemed friendly and soft-spoken, but her folks were like “if you’re going to date whom you want, you better have a job and live on your own.” Well, one day, she got mad because I asked her to work a shift she didn’t want to. So she simply didn’t show up, which really fucked me over. So I called her up, pretty pissed. No answer.
She didn’t show up for 3 days. So I fired her for job abandonment. She didn’t really need the job, right? Her parents owned a racetrack.
A week later, her folks called me, and asked if I’d seen her. No, she didn’t show up for work ever again. They panicked. “OMFG WE DON’T KNOW WHERE SHE IS!” They immediately assumed her BF kidnapped and/or murdered her. The police were called, an investigation was opened up. Her BF’s address showed he’d moved away. I had to sit with the police and go through an interrogation about her last whereabouts. She became a missing person, and once a week for two months, her parents called and asked if I had heard anything. The detective called with more questions. Then her car was found in an impound lot: it had been abandoned and looted in a New Jersey parking garage. Then the calls petered off and stopped.
A year went by, and I assumed the worst.
One day, one of the employees in another store in the mall told me he saw her with her BF. I didn’t believe them, but then other people said that they’d seen her, and corroborated some stories she told them. Apparently, she had been planning to run away for some time, and just ran away with her BF and went NC with her family. That didn’t work out so well, because both had trouble finding jobs and then their car got carjacked. Both of them were forced to return home, and her parents were forced to reconcile that she was never going to leave her BF.
I was pretty pissed, though, that I thought she was dead.
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Yesterday, I (sort of) learned the phrase “implication arrows,” from which I learned that I should assume that this story is not true, though the arrows… Imply that it’s true. I still don’t really get it.
Anyway, I’ve never held a job where the employer would do more than the bare minimum required by law if I disappeared. Certainly not so much as contacting my family unless there were extenuating circumstances like me verifiably disappearing mid shift. I suspect this is true for most people.
I’ve always been skeptical of greentext (and most internet) stories, it’s just more fun to suspend one’s disbelief.
I’m just still confused about the concept of “implication arrows,” heh.
