There’s something very wrong with this story.
A Wells Fargo employee in Tempe, Arizona, died at her desk and wasn’t found till four days later (see video). She was 60 years old and working in a cubicle. The medical examiner has not yet found a cause of death, although foul play is not suspected.
But how could she have been there, slumped over her desk for four days, without anybody noticing? I’m guessing she lived alone. When she didn’t come home from work, no one reported her missing, no one made a fuss. A few other employees in the building noticed a rather nasty smell, but thought it was coming from the pipes.
I had a small, windowless office at my newspaper. What if I had died at my desk? Would anyone have noticed? There were times when I was the only person in the office. How can you die, and no one notice for four whole days?
Come to think of it, I did once faint at my desk–no air conditioning, way too hot–only to wake up and find myself the only person in the building. Everybody else had gone out to eat. No one knew I’d fainted from the heat.
I wonder if this woman could have been saved, if only someone had found her in time.
This needs to be seen to. It mustn’t happen again.
This is the stuff of nightmares. I don’t recall ever being at work where there wasn’t some kind of cleaning crew who came through on a regular basis (at least every other day), opening office doors to clean out trash and vac. I guess the only scenario I can imagine this happening in a “civilized” workplace is over a long weekend (but that may be a stretch, too).
I’ve had to make equipment changes on a Saturday, and been the only human in a 105,000 square foot building. Most of my work is mundane, but at times I need to use a ladder, and don’t really like doing this if I’m alone in the building. The world has changed, and many people work in relative isolation.
Of course, with some of today’s workers, the only way to know that they had died would be an uptick in their productivity. 🙂