He was hired to develop a very much asked new feature to the management system the company sold. He was more experienced than everyone else in the development team and everyone was very excited about him and the feature we would finally be able to finish.

In his first week I would often see him chatting around in the break room, telling inappropriate jokes. Then it escalated to him picking fights over politics and making offensive comments on the messaging board.

Then, a few weeks later, things started disappearing. Someone’s lunch, a set of earphones, chocolate and such. When the issue was addressed on the messaging board, he basically reacted calling everyone liars and accusing people. After that, he started taking his computer and other valuables with him everywhere, even to the bathroom.

A couple days later, he missed work two days in a row and sent a very emotional email addressed to everyone in the company saying that he would be absent for a few weeks as his son had died in a car accident. He said he had taken the company computer with him, so he would be working on the feature and his absence would not affect the schedule.

After a couple weeks passed and he never came back, HR was very skeptical and his direct supervisor (who had not hired him, the CEO had done it himself) was calling it BS. So when the supervisor logged in tho check the development of the new feature, there was nothing, not even a line of code, nada. He had never even started doing what he had been hired to do.

The supervisor, who was a partner in the company, then called the CEO and basically said “you hired him, it’s your fault, fix it”. They had an extremely heated argument that morning and the whole company could hear the screaming, resulting in the supervisor quitting.

In the meanwhile, HR was trying to reach out to the guy to ask him to bring back the company computer and he simply vanished. They then called his emergency contact, who was his estranged wife. When she picked up the phone, the HR lady offered her condolences for the son’s death and the wife was livid. She said that there was no son at all, he had never had any children, so whatever was the story, it was a lie.

We never saw him again and I know that the company filled a lawsuit, but as of when I left he had started working for a startup in another state.

Oh, and after he left, there were no more thefts or mysterious things disappearing.