Who's that again in the next cubicle?

I'm all in favor of work from home (WFH), with an ultra-strong preference for a hybrid model - either 3 days in, 2 days WFH, or 2 WFH, 3 days in the office. A hybrid model gives employees some breathing room: no commute, throw a load of wash in, catch up with the kiddos after school and catch up on the work after the kiddos are down for the night. And having time in the office also gives employees the opportunity to get to know their colleagues, to have impromptu meetings where problems are solved and ideas brainstormed, to read the room in a way you just plain can't on Zoom, to have genuine human contact in an increasingly isolated world. Time in the office also makes it a lot easier to onboard new employees. 

So Hybrid WFH, yay! Best of both worlds. BIG YAY!

The downside of full WFH is, of course, the opposite of the above. 

And, apparently, the empty offices that accompany WFH may be a matter of life and death.

As happened in August when a Wells Fargo employee had  "scanned into her office on a Friday morning and was found dead at her desk four days later."

According to local outlets, authorities said 60-year-old Denise Prudhomme entered her Wells Fargo office building located on the 1100 block of West Washington Street in Tempe, Arizona, at 7am on 16 August. (Source: The Guardian)

Prudhomme's body was discovered when a fellow employee who was just strolling around the building noticed something amiss in her cubicle, which was in a somewhat isolated space off the main aisle. Other employees had smelled a noxious odor, but chalked it up to bad plumbing. Oh.

Obviously, this can't all be laid at the door of WFH. 

Sure, Prudhomme was in the office on a Friday, a day on which many WFH-ers WFH. And her body wasn't found until the end of the workday on Monday, another popular WFH day. But maybe her job was one in which she didn't interact regularly with others, virtually or in person. Or maybe she died late in the workday on that Friday, after her virtual meetings were over. And who was going to discover her body over the weekend? I'm guessing that one thing that WFH has done is radically decrease the amount of time folks spend coming into the office on weekends. 

And it looks like she may have lived alone, given that no one reported her missing. Even my often-oblivious husband would have noticed if I didn't make it home from work on a Friday evening. So, if she lived at home and didn't have any plans for the weekend - which I entirely get: when I worked full time, I had plenty of weekends where I craved my "white space"; introverts be like that - no one would have noticed that she wasn't around

Still, hard not to believe that, in a full(er) office, someone would have passed by Denise Prudhomme's cubicle and noticed that something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe even saved her life. As of this writing, the cause of her death wasn't known. Foul play is not suspected. But maybe she choked on something, and someone in the next cubicle might have known the Heimlich maneuver. Maybe she had a heart attack, and could have been CPR'd back to life if someone nearby had heard her head hit the desk. 

People do die at work. When I worked at Wang Labs, we had layoffs all the time. And in the run up to one of the worst layoffs - in early Octobe one year, they'd announced that there'd be a major reduction by December 1st, and damned if they didn't wait until December 1st - a fellow who, as it turned out, was on the pink slip list, had a heart attack and died. 

But the people who worked in the cubes surrounding his knew what had happened. They just weren't able to save his life.

Anyway, hard not to read about Denise Prudhomme and think that, if there'd been more people around, she may not still be alive. But her final story wouldn't be worldwide, tsk tsk news. And fodder for bloggers. Sigh.