I asked the manager who the user was, and he said he wasn’t authorized to give me a name, but he could tell me the department attached to the account. It wasn’t housekeeping. It wasn’t payroll. It was listed under administration, and the account had access to every employee’s time records. I asked him why an administrator would be changing only my clock-outs, and he said he didn’t know. Then I asked him to print the access history for my entire file. He hesitated, but he did it, and I took it home and spread the pages across my kitchen table. The edits weren’t random. Every one of them happened after I’d already clocked out, and every time the adjustment brought me just under the number of hours that would have triggered overtime.
I called the other housekeepers I’d worked with and asked if their records had ever been changed. One of them laughed and said she thought I was joking, because she’d complained about exactly the same thing six months earlier. Another woman checked her old pay stubs and found that she’d lost hours too. We started comparing dates, and the same user account appeared on all of our records. Then one of the women noticed something I hadn’t: the edits weren’t being made on the days we worked extra hours. They were being made the following morning, usually before anyone from housekeeping arrived. I called corporate again and gave them the names and dates, and the woman on the phone went silent for long enough that I knew she’d found something. Then she asked me whether the hotel had ever offered me a promotion that I turned down.
I said no, and she asked me if I’d ever applied for a supervisor position. I told her I had, two years earlier, and that I’d been told someone else was more qualified. She asked me who had interviewed me. I gave her the name, and she said that was the same person attached to the account making the edits. Then she asked me to check one more thing. I pulled out the email from when I’d applied for that position, and there was an attachment I’d never opened because I’d assumed it was just the job description. It wasn’t. It was a copy of the evaluation they had supposedly completed after my interview, and it said I had refused the promotion because I didn’t want the responsibility. I never said that. I had actually been told the position was already promised to someone else. And at the bottom of the evaluation was a digital signature — dated the exact week my hours first started being changed — belonging to the person who had…
