Someone Kept Clocking In After I Went Home

I got fired for time theft, which is a strange fate for a person who could barely be bothered to work the hours she was actually paid for.

I worked front desk and scheduling at a small clinic. We used a login-based time system, badge in, badge out, your hours tie to your username. Simple. Honest. Or it was supposed to be. The trouble came at my six-month review, when my manager slid over a printout with a highlighter mark and asked me to "explain these."

The highlights were hours. Lots of them. Extra hours, under my login, on nights I was home watching television and weekends I was, in one memorable case, at my sister's wedding two states away with three hundred witnesses. My login had badged in at 9:14 on a Saturday I spent giving a toast. My login had worked until 11 on a Tuesday I spent asleep by 9:30. According to the system, I was the hardest working person in the building, and I had been quietly stealing overtime for months.

I said, truthfully, that I had not worked those hours. That was, it turned out, the wrong thing to say, because if I had not worked them, then someone using my credentials had, and the clinic did not want a mystery, the clinic wanted a culprit, and I was standing right there with my name on the log.

I tried to investigate it myself, which in hindsight looks like exactly what a guilty person would do. The extra hours followed a pattern once I looked. They clustered on days I was off. They never overlapped with hours I genuinely worked, which meant whoever it was knew my schedule, knew when the desk would be empty and my login unwatched. That is not a random glitch. That is a person, in that building, choosing my name.

Our system did not require a password most of the time, just a badge tap, and my badge lived in my coat, and my coat lived on a hook in the shared back room like everyone else's. Anyone could have lifted it, tapped in as me, and set it back. I said all of this. I said it calmly and then, as the meetings went on, less calmly. Every explanation I gave to prove my innocence also, if you tilted your head, described how easily I could be lying.