The client told me the call had happened exactly as my records showed. She said someone from my office had contacted her in April and asked her to confirm that I had failed to log the March call. I asked whether she still had the caller’s name or number, and she said she had saved the voicemail. The caller had introduced himself as someone from my department, but it wasn’t me. Then she forwarded me the voicemail, and I recognized the voice immediately. It belonged to a coworker who had been sitting two desks away from me for nearly ten years.
I took the voicemail and my confirmation email to HR and asked them why they had documented a complaint against me without speaking to the client first. They said the allegation had come from several colleagues, but when I asked for their names, nobody could provide them. My manager finally admitted that the coworker had reported that I was “becoming unreliable” and had provided three examples. Two were calls I had actually completed, and the third was the one the client had just confirmed. I asked why nobody had checked the records before putting the allegation in my personnel file. The room went quiet. Then HR asked me whether I had any idea why someone would want me gone.
I did. The coworker who made the complaint had applied for my position six weeks earlier and been rejected because I had been chosen to lead a major client account. My attorney requested the original emails and discovered that the “multiple colleagues” were actually one person repeating the same allegations to different managers. The company removed the false documentation and withdrew my termination. The coworker resigned before the investigation was finished, but the client continued working with me for another four years. They said I was becoming forgetful, but the one person trying to prove it was the only person who couldn’t remember that I kept records of everything.
