Because some employees leave more than just a rusting stapler behind
I was tasked with clearing out the office of a manager who had left the company abruptly for personal reasons. In one of his drawers, I found a beautifully wrapped present addressed ‘To my darling wife’. I thought he might want it back so I rang him, only for him to reveal that the reason he had departed so swiftly was because his wife had left him for another man.
I was given a purse that had been found in the building. There was nothing to identify the owner, which was a shame since it was full of cannabis. I put out an email to all staff saying a purse had been handed in and to contact me. Nobody replied.
We once found an artificial leg in the office. Fortunately, it was a spare.
We found a machete inside the company-owned vehicle of an employee who had been suspended pending an investigation. When questioned, he told us he was keeping it for “personal protection” while out and about.
I used to have an employee who was constantly in trouble with his line manager for not submitting his attendance sheets. He claimed he had submitted them, but his manager was insistent that she had never seen them. After they had both left, I found a stash of the employee’s missing attendance sheets… signed off and dated by the manager and stuffed in the back of a cupboard.
I once found seven pairs of size eight stilettos. After some discreet enquiries, I managed to reunite them with their male owner.
While clearing out an office, I found an abandoned urn, complete with contents.
In a mainly female office, our male boss stopped us working to announce that he had found some lost property. He then held up the item in question, a rather large padded bra insert. I think it’s still in the lost property box.
I once found a faux leopard skin steering wheel cover and rear view mirror cover.
While clearing out the desk of somebody who had retired, I found some tea leaves with a best-before date of 1989 and a horse’s hoof that had been converted into an ashtray.
While working in a café, I found a pair of false teeth carefully wrapped up in a serviette. A little later, a rather embarrassed gentleman came in to enquire whether we had found “something of his”.
An employee who was responsible for incoming invoices left abruptly. Inside his drawer were £100,000 of extremely overdue bills and court letters he had stashed away and ignored…