…”every Thursday you’ve ‘gone to the dentist’ since August. That’s a lot of dental work.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I’m not trying to be the bad guy here. I just need to know you’re committed. Let’s say you take the recruiter off your list, and we forget about the dentist.”
I nodded. I said I understood. I went back to my desk and sat there for ten minutes with my hands shaking. Then I did something I’d never done in nine years at that company. I walked past my boss’s office, up two floors, and asked to see the head of HR.
Her name was Carol. I put the printout on her desk. It showed every place my phone had been for three months, with times, down to the minute. Hospice. Pharmacy. My dad’s oncologist. The recruiter. My own home, at night.
Carol went very quiet. “The fleet tracker is for our delivery routes,” she said. “Managers aren’t supposed to have access to individual employees’ locations. Who gave him this?”
It turned out nobody had. He’d asked IT for “admin access to troubleshoot,” and nobody questioned it. Carol called IT while I sat there. Within the hour, they’d found that he’d pulled location reports on four people on my team. All women. All for months.
He was escorted out of the building on Wednesday. Carol came down to my desk afterward and told me two things. That she was sorry. And that I was eligible for family medical leave, and should have been told that a long time ago.
I took it. I spent the next six weeks with my dad. We watched old westerns, and I read him the sports page every morning, and he told me stories about my mom I’d never heard. He passed on a Sunday in November, holding my hand. Nobody tracked where I was that day. Nobody needed to know.
When I came back, there was an offer waiting from the recruiter. I took it. On my last day, I handed my company phone to Carol. She held it up and said, “You know, you’re the reason we found all of this.”
My new job gave me a laptop and nothing else. I keep my own phone in my pocket. And every Thursday, I still go somewhere at lunch. Usually it’s just the park by my office, where I sit on a bench and call my dad’s old number, just to hear his voicemail.
