the unpaid invoices, the voodoo altar, and other things you found after an employee left

Earlier this month, we talked about discoveries your company made after an employee left, and here are 11 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The unpaid invoices

We were having an issue with vendors complaining that their invoices weren’t being paid, even though we were all submitting correctly coded invoices in a timely fashion. Then someone from AP quit, and it was discovered that she had been so overwhelmed by the volume of work that whenever a new invoice came in (physically, via interoffice mail), she would just throw it in a box under her desk and ignore it.

2. The fake photographer

I discovered that another coworker who was let go had been publishing his own photos in his magazine under a fake name so that he could get paid for them as a freelancer. He was the one responsible for approving all freelance invoices, so he was signing his own fake invoices and submitting them to accounting. Surprisingly, this is NOT why he was let go!

3. The mercury and the voodoo altar

I’ve had to clean out research labs when faculty leave. Among the delightful things that I’ve found: an open container with 500 mL of mercury, old chemicals in danger of exploding (so many bomb squad calls!), $2,000 in expired gift cards for subject compensation, and … a voodoo altar.

4. The side business

We had one administrative assistant go out on sudden medical leave and discovered she had been running a whole side business out of the office. In addition to using company office supplies – paper, envelopes, printing, etc, she was running up almost $4,000 dollars a month in shipping!

She had asked soon after she started if she could work a shifted schedule and, because she was a hard worker, the bosses had agreed. She’d get in around 10:30-11:00 but would stay for several hours after the rest of the office cleared out around 6:00. She quickly became known as the one who would help out if you needed something finalized last minute. And she was more than happy to do a late run to the main branch of the post office or the FedEx center if you had something that had to get out after the end of day pick up.

After she had been out for several weeks, the mailroom guys noticed they were not reloading the post meter as often as usual. And there were a few other supplies that were not needing reordering as often or in as large a quantity. There were also a few things that, once we realized no one was using them, it prompted our office manager to wonder why we were ordering them in the first place.

When she had initially went out, we had all been very respectful of her work area and only grabbed necessary files – anything that looked personal had been left alone. But this all prompted office manager to look a little more closely at those personal files and then IT did a deep dive on her computer. She was running some kind of newsletter/mail order business and our company was supplying all the printing and shipping supplies and costs.

5. The time discrepancy

A process that an employee insisted took him most of the work day was actually a one-hour-at-most task.

I’d long suspected it, but this employee never took sick days and never went on vacation (so nobody ever had to sub in for him and discover this).

He managed to convince all our MBA-holding leadership for six years that he was doing more work than he was — and then retired. And honestly? I kind of admire that.

6. The departure

When I left my very dysfunctional company, my former colleagues sent me daily questions about the whole back office and admin stuff – things I did “on the side,” unpaid and always without acknowledgment (although somehow I was often blamed IF something was forgotten … funny).

I redirected my colleguages with some kind but firm words to my bosses (a couple who should have divorced decades ago), who then immediately forwarded those questions to me with a, “Please answer ASAP since you always did this and there is no documentation” (spoiler: there was).

I let those messages immediately get set as read and go into a folder I didn’t regularly see … and on days that I felt petty, I joyfully read every single question before deleting the mail.

7. The diary

At a job I had many years ago, it was discovered that one coworker had apparently been keeping a very explicit diary about her extramarital activities with an advertiser on her work computer. What’s even more baffling than her thinking this was a good idea in the first place (clearly her thought process didn’t progress beyond “My husband will never find it here!”) is the fact that she left this job voluntarily and had plenty of opportunity to delete it before she walked out the door.

8. The cut-out

My manager was terminated for cause. When we went to clean out their cubicle we found a larger-than-life cardboard cut-out of their manager’s head in the overhead cabinet. Opened the cabinet, saw a face looking out at us, and everyone jumped.

9. The DJ

We had a long-term temp/contract worker covering our front desk (in a university academic department) while our regular employee was out on maternity leave. The temp was just okay at best – he certainly would not have been hired as a permanent staff member.

After the regular employee returned to work she said she kept getting calls about hiring our DJ. It turns out the temp spent most of his time promoting his DJ job while he was supposed to be working.

10. The notebook

I once found the personal notebook of one of my predecessors … in which they had written all of their complaints about my then-boss, to whom we both reported as an assistant.

My predecessor’s complaints exactly reflected the horror show I was experiencing with that boss and were instrumental in me realizing I deserved better and that the dysfunction in my office was not my fault.

11. The fortuitous embezzlement

I was working as an admin at a small relatively new university grad program. A month before school started one fall, my boss, the administrative director, suddenly quit without notice. How she quit is a whole saga in itself, the short version is she manufactured a situation that allowed her to quit in indignation at a supposed privacy violation, which meant the university agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement about her departure before anyone realized why she really quit.

Because it turned out she quit right before an audit into our program’s budget. And that audit was going to turn up that she routinely hired contractors to do work she claimed to be doing herself (such as designing and editing our quarterly newsmagazine), and also routinely bought both groceries for her own personal use (we had an on-site cafeteria and she used the same grocery service so it looked like a normal expense on the budget) and charged private car service to get from our workplace to her parents’ house (clear across the very large city we were in, not cheap).

She also had attempted to wipe her laptop harddrive but wasn’t particularly tech savvy so IT was able to restore most of it. However she had been communicating with the contractors she had had hired through a non-university email that she successfully did delete evidence of, which meant three years later I was still getting contacted by contractors who had never been paid for work they did right before she quit, as they finally tracked down our program’s website and thus me (the main admin contact). (We did pay them. By that point, the dean had resigned himself to having to deal with a certain amount of her unexpected expenses popping up a year.)

Although that month after she quit was one of the most intense work periods of my life, it ended up working out well for my career path. Because of course we found out she had not started on the student handbook that needed to go to the printer in two weeks to be ready by orientation – so I stepped in, learned InDesign on the fly, and did so well that I got to keep ownership of the newsletter and other print production. Three and a half years later, I moved to a job where newsletter production was in my job description from the beginning and now, much later, I am a freelancer specializing in editing and publication layout in a niche (non-academic) industry. If that boss hadn’t quit the way she did, I might never have gotten that chance.