It sounds like a scene from a comedy series, but the story is very real. An American employee was hired by one of the world’s largest property companies… only to be literally forgotten. For the past seven months, he has been earning a salary approaching six figures while remaining inactive.
A contract signed, a manager sacked, and then… the void
It all begins when an employee, living on the east coast of the United States, lands an administrative position with a major international property company. Just before his first day, the manager who had recruited him was sacked. As a result, no one gave him any assignments or made him part of a team.
When he arrived for his first day, an employee from another department simply showed him to his office. Since then, he has sat alone in an empty space behind his former manager’s desk. For several weeks, he tried to report the situation to other managers, but to no avail. None of his superiors seemed concerned by his plight.
Work (barely), cash in, start again
Despite this organisational void, the employee says he continues to clock in and out regularly: he goes into the office three days a week to check in, and teleworks the other two. His only tasks? He creates salary calculation sheets, which he sends to his superior every week, without ever receiving any feedback. This takes him just 15 minutes a week.
The rest of the time, he reads, watches videos… or does nothing. He admits that he is not looking for a second teleworking job to fill his days. “I’m a confirmed slacker. I don’t even feel like doing this job, so a second one? Definitely not,” he explains on Reddit.
An isolated case… or symptomatic?
This testimony, which has gone viral, reveals a flagrant organisational dysfunction. Yet such cases are not uncommon. Companies such as Meta have already been accused of recruiting engineers during the pandemic… without ever giving them the slightest assignment, just to **prevent them from joining the competition**.
In Spain too, internal audits have sometimes revealed similar situations: employees officially in post, present in HR files, but totally inactive due to a lack of hierarchical follow-up.
The case of this employee raises questions: how can a company ignore the existence of an employee for several months? It raises questions not only about human resources management, but also about the logic of certain mass recruitments in large organisations, where a cog can disappear without the machine even noticing.
While waiting to be ‘discovered’, our ghost employee savours his strange good fortune. Paid on the nose, with no constraints or responsibilities, he has become the unlikely symbol of a capitalism that sometimes forgets itself.
Is this guys name George Costanza?
I once got hired at a leading software company to perform software testing yet on day one I was not issued a computer. I sat at my desk with a paper pad, pen, and office phone. I had no access of any kind to the company network. Although I handwrote my manager (who I never even met or spoke with) daily status reports and left them with the receptionist, the only response I got was increasingly concerned phone calls from the agency that placed me, reporting the client’s growing discontent that I had made no progress at all on tasks like installing the software I was to test. I repeatedly noted my lack of any PC. This continued for two weeks at which point I had an anxiety attack and just stopped showing up. The client HR person then called me a couple times a week for a month leaving me answering machine messages asking why I quit. To this day all I can say is, WTF? The company was Adobe Systems by the way, at their downtown Seattle campus around 1993. It was when All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow was getting saturation play and that song is for me forever tied to an image of my barren cubicle with paper pad and pen. Good company—unexplainable aberration.
This story is unbelievable! It’s crazy to think someone could be paid for doing nothing for so long. It really raises questions about the hiring process and how companies manage their employees. I wonder if there are more cases like this out there?
I had the opposite experience. I was a superhost on airbnb for 5 years, hosting as a ghost as it turns out ErrorBNB verified & authenticated my account solely to my Middle and last name alone (which given I do not use my legal first name & have always been known and gone by my Middle didnt raise any red flags for me until city regulations came into effect & I was notified by city of the discrepancy. I was shocked & annoyed as I was forced to edit & correct what ErrorBNB should have already been aware of and done themselves! I informed them & updated fully now required to display my full legal name first middle & last. You would think my troubles ended here however this is ErrorBNB we are talking about! Have you ever tried using their support line? Pray you never need to! Life support is what I required as they saw me now as two separate individuals – investigated me that way as well now cutting me into two identities neither one truly or legally myself and banned me for life because well they’re idiots through & through. Rather than earning extra income like the guy in the article I lost my income!