Could this happen at your office? Death mentioned.

Wow, that is so sad.

Cindy

Yes & no. I don’t actually work in an office.

A few weeks ago there was an article of a guy who stopped going to work for 6 years but still got paid. I joked with my boss that would last me 4 days tops and only if it aligned with a Friday off Monday holiday scenario. Like if I had had this Friday off she wouldn’t look for me until this coming Tuesday. So theoretically it could be 4 days if things aligned just right.

However, this idea is a real thing for those of us who live alone. Currently my son is staying with me but I’ve lived mostly alone for 7 years since my divorce. When my kids went to college I used to joke that I knew someone who had their phone password was alive if my Snapchat’s were opened. When they got out of college things flipped. My kids & my niece all check if I’ve opened their snapchats. If I haven’t one of them calls me by evening. Else yeah it could go days before anyone found me. But again I don’t go into an office. And I’m not so sure anyone would do anything if a client called either. Not right away. When I had to go to the ER they just forwarded the clients angry phone call to my voicemail and I had to deal with that when I came back to work.

My job would deduct pay back to my time of death though.

I wish this was even a remote possibility for me. I would be dead for about ten minutes max before someone needed me for something.

Well, my husband would know if I didn’t come home…but if we’re just talking about the office we have custodial staff there a lot of the time. I’m pretty sure they are there til the later evening. We don’t swipe out, so I don’t think anyone would know if I never left.

No, we had a nightly cleaning crew, so she would have been found.

We did have an older man, well loved, who came out of retirement to help with a project. He didn't show up or answer his phone one morning, so someone went to his home. They called the police when he didn't answer his door. He was deceased.

My DIL's mother was found the same way.

My sweet neighbors were worried about me when they hadn't seen me for a few days. That was last week when I had covid.

The longest I could imagine being dead in my office before being found under normal circumstances would be part of a morning or an afternoon, so maybe a few hours. If I didn't come home, my husband would come looking for me. If he happened to be out of town, it would maybe be the next morning. The same time frame would be true for my colleagues. When we leave for the evening, it's usually either my partner, my boss, or me who is the last one out. We all look to make sure everyone is gone before we leave because we have to set an alarm, so we'd come check on any lights/open doors we noticed on the way out.

My boss and my direct reports all check in with one another at least once a day. I've always instilled in my managers to make sure everyone is OK, every day. Hell, I've called employees out on PTO because I forgot they were off and I didn't see them log in.

And this, boys and girls, is why we don't devote all our time and energy to any job. Focus your energy on the people who will notice if you die.

I don't think this could have happened at any office I've worked in, but I do know two people that died at home and weren't found for several days.

One was an employee and the other a BFF's father. Both were men who lived alone, had history of heart attacks/strokes in the time before cell phones and no one went physically looking for them until they didn't show up for work on Monday. A second employee in a similar situation was found alive, but died in hospital a few days later. 

Yes, absolutely, 100%. My university cut back on cleaning to once a week, and they don’t even always come once a week. If you closed your office door, not to be too crass, the only way someone would find you sooner would be the smell. If you didn’t show up to teach during the teaching parts of the year, it would probably take two missed class sessions for the administration to try to find you, but my guess is they wouldn’t look in your office.

I have had several older (80+) colleagues and I have feared something like this.

That's incredibly sad.

We had one employee who refused to leave at 5:00 with the rest of us. Luckily she retired last year but I could have pictured this happening to her. She was 72 and had a bad heart. She frequently stayed at the office until 7 or 8 pm. If it was a Friday she could have died after 5 and wouldn't have been found until Monday morning.