She Went to Work on Friday and Never Left

PR King
E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower
3 min readSep 24, 2024

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Photo by Nastuh Abootalebi on Unsplash

Sixty-year-old Denise Prudhomme clocked into the Tempe, Arizona, Wells Fargo office building on Friday, August 16, 2024, at 7 AM, but she never clocked out. That should have raised a red flag, but it didn’t.

On Tuesday, August 20, there were complaints about an offensive odor on the third floor of the building. An employee went to investigate and found Denise slumped, dead, across her desk. It was determined that she died on Friday.

She worked in an isolated area with numerous empty cubicles nearby because many employees worked remotely. It doesn’t seem like anyone interacted with Denise, knew who she was, or even that she was there.

One has to assume Denise was vetted, interviewed, and hired through bureaucratic hiring processes because she had a valid badge. Yet no one seems to have known her.

How does that happen at a company like Wells Fargo, which is rumored to monitor employees closely, even their keystrokes?

I worked from home for many years, but every once in a while, I’d go into one of the company offices to work. Since many employees worked remotely, there were banks of empty cubicles, just as in the Wells Fargo office. The only way to interact with others was to take the time to walk around and poke your head into others’ cubes. Chats were limited to hellos…

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PR King
E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower

Florida stories, history fan, avid reader, geeky Boomer, Sagittarian with a Capricorn moon, Chromebook convert, military brat, sober 30+