She went back for a jacket she’d left behind and her badge still worked. So did her login, which had been logging overtime shifts for three weeks without her.
Sela Muñoz only came back for the jacket.
She holds the badge to the reader out of habit, the way you try a light switch in a house you’ve moved out of.
It beeps green.
Sela: Huh.
The door opens. The lobby is the same. The plant is the same. Her name is off the directory.
She goes up, gets the jacket out of the locker, and stands there for a while.
Then she goes to a floor terminal and types her employee number, expecting it to fail.
It doesn’t fail either.
The timesheet loads.
Sela Muñoz. Current period. Ninety-four hours.
She left on the twelfth.
Sela: No.
She scrolls. There are shifts logged for last Saturday. Last Sunday. A ten-hour Tuesday. All approved. All approved by the same person.
Boyd Lassiter. Her old supervisor.
She takes photographs of the screen with her phone. Eleven of them. She does not print anything, does not email anything to herself, does not touch a single key beyond the arrow down.
Then she logs out and leaves the building and sits in her car for twenty minutes.
She calls the HR line the next morning.
Sela: My access was never revoked and my account is logging hours I didn’t work.
HR: I’m sorry — you said you’re a former employee?
Sela: Since the twelfth.
HR: And you accessed the system?
Sela: With credentials your company left active. Yes.
A long pause.
HR: Ms. Muñoz, can you hold?
She holds for six minutes.
Priya Raghunathan calls her back that afternoon. Internal audit, not HR.
Priya: I need to ask you something directly. Did you work any of those hours?
Sela: No.
Priya: Would you sign a statement saying so?
Sela: Today.
Priya: Can I ask why you called us and not a lawyer?
Sela: Because I want it stopped this week, not in two years.
What happened after
Boyd Lassiter had been running his department’s overtime through three departed employees’ accounts to keep his headcount looking clean while the work got done by the people still there — who were being paid, but under names that weren’t theirs, so the hours never showed up against his budget.
Two of them had been on shift for eleven weeks under Sela’s login.
The audit found sixty-one thousand dollars in misallocated labour across four quarters. Nobody had stolen money. Somebody had been hiding it, which the finance director explained to a room full of people is worse.
Lassiter was not prosecuted. He was removed from any role with approval authority and left four months later. The company rebuilt its offboarding process so badge and system access are revoked by the same automated action as the final payslip, and an outside firm now audits terminated accounts monthly.
Sela got a letter apologizing for the access failure and nothing else, because she was owed nothing else. She wasn’t looking for anything.
She starts somewhere new in September.
She still has the jacket.
Read the rest of the series in The Mosaic Stories.
More from the series: Her Father Calls At 4:07 Every Day — The Day He Called At 2:15, She Drove Straight There · The Bus Was Twenty Minutes Late Every Thursday — She Followed It To Find Out Why
Leave a Reply