I took the appointment cards to my attorney, and she immediately told me not to contact my supervisor. She compared the three incident reports with my medical records and found something impossible: all three reports described me working full shifts on days I had documented chemotherapy appointments. I was at the clinic from before eight in the morning until nearly four in the afternoon on each date. Then she asked me to check whether anyone else had been listed as a witness on the reports. All three names belonged to coworkers who had already left the company. One of them had moved out of state months before the first report was supposedly written.
My attorney requested the original electronic records from the company, including creation dates and login information. The reports hadn’t been created on the dates written on them. Two were created only three days before I was fired, and the third was created the morning after I requested my personnel file. Even worse, the account used to create them belonged to my supervisor’s assistant. I had trained that assistant fifteen years earlier, and she called me privately after my attorney contacted the company. She said she had been told to enter the reports exactly as they were given to her, and she still had the emails instructing her what to write.
The company suddenly withdrew the original termination letter and offered me a settlement. I refused until they agreed to correct my personnel record and acknowledge that the incident reports were fabricated. They eventually did both, and the four other older employees I remembered were contacted as part of the investigation. My supervisor resigned before the investigation was finished, but the assistant kept copies of everything and gave them to my attorney. I never returned to that building after twenty-six years, but I left knowing the truth was finally on paper. They said my hands were no longer reliable, but the records proved the only thing they couldn’t control was where I actually was.
