I asked the manager to pull up the user ID and he went quiet for a second, then said he couldn’t discuss employee access with me. I told him I wasn’t asking about anybody else’s hours, I was asking why someone had been inside my record forty-one times and changed hours I had actually worked. He finally called corporate while I stood there, and when they gave him the same information, his whole voice changed. The edits weren’t being made from the front desk computer, and they weren’t being made from the payroll office either. They were coming through a supervisor account that was supposed to be used only for scheduling, and every edit had been entered between midnight and three in the morning. I asked who had access to that account, and he said there were only three people, but one of them hadn’t worked at the hotel in almost two years.
Corporate sent me a copy of the access history the next afternoon, and there was something stranger in it than the missing hours. The account had been used every time my hours were changed, but it had also been used to open the records of five other housekeepers. Their hours had been reduced too, always by a small amount, never enough to make somebody notice immediately. I called one of the women because I knew her, and she told me she’d always thought her checks were wrong but figured she’d miscounted. Then she checked the notebook where she kept her hours, and hers were short by almost six hundred dollars over the previous year. We compared our records and found the same pattern, except mine went back farther because I’d been keeping my own notebook every day since I started there. The manager told me corporate wanted everyone to stop discussing it until they finished an investigation, and that’s when I knew somebody was worried about more than a few missing hours.
That evening I went through my notebook again and found something I’d missed because I’d been looking only at the total hours. On several Fridays, the exact amount removed from my timecard was almost identical to the overtime amount I’d earned, as if somebody had been making sure I stayed just under the threshold. I called the corporate number directly and gave them the dates, and the woman on the phone asked me one question: whether I’d ever been asked to sign a paper agreeing to work off the clock. I said no, never. She put me on hold and came back sounding different, then asked me to look at the bottom of my original hiring paperwork. There was an acknowledgment there that I had never seen before, saying I had agreed that any unapproved overtime would be removed from my paycheck. But the signature next to it wasn’t mine. I knew that because my mother taught me to sign my name the same way on every document, and this one had been copied from something else. Then the woman told me the signature had been added to my file three months after I was hired — and the person who uploaded it was the same former employee whose account had been changing our hours.
