On Friday, August 16, in Tempe, Arizona, 60-year-old Denise Prudhomme scanned in at 7:00 a.m. to the Wells Fargo office where she worked. Prudhomme never scanned out. Over the next few days, employees complained of a foul odor, but attributed it to faulty plumbing. On Tuesday, August 20, Prudhomme was found by another employee who was walking around her cubicle area. Prudhomme was slumped over her desk and unresponsive. The employee alerted building security, who then called 911. When officers arrived, they confirmed that Prudhomme was dead.
There’s an investigation underway in Tempe after a Wells Fargo employee died while on the job. A new timeline released by police suggests her body was there for four days before being discovered.
“It’s really heartbreaking and I’m thinking, ‘What if I were just sitting there?'” a worker said. “No one would check on me?”
The body was found inside the Wells Fargo corporate office in Tempe. An associate who spoke with 12News anonymously said the situation is troubling.
“To hear she’s been sitting at the desk like that would make me feel sick,” the worker said. “And nobody did anything. That’s how she spent her last moments.”
This woman clocked in at 7am, went to her cubicle and died. Her body sat at the desk for 4 days until someone found her. She was on an open floor of cubicles and coworkers just assumed the smell was a plumbing problem. https://t.co/1g44m2Rvj1
— Kenny Webster (@KennethRWebster) August 29, 2024
How does this happen? The local news interviewed several employees who wanted to remain anonymous, and they said it was a big building and not everyone works in the office every day. Some of the employees were upset over hearing that Prudhomme died alone at her desk, and are blaming their employer because of it. But is it Wells Fargo’s fault that no one bothered to check in on Prudhomme or say goodnight or good morning to her? I have not worked in corporate America for 16 years, but it seems as though workplace relations have devolved incredibly if someone can rot at their desk for four days without anyone even noticing.
This tragic story is less about our unhealthy relationship with work and the workplace, and more about our disconnection from face-to-face interaction and community connection. I blame devices for some of this, and I am too often just as guilty as everyone else. We rely on Facebook, texts, and other social media to check in on people, including our family and loved ones. Heck, we don’t even know who is running our country, and some of us don’t care. This is how disconnected we have become as a country.
At one job where I worked for seven years, we co-workers developed a mini-community. We not only lunched together, but we had each other’s home phone–and ultimately–cell numbers, and we knew when one of us was really sick or had been hospitalized. One co-worker, Jenifer, battled breast cancer, and we were there to support her through chemo. Another co-worker, Deborah, suffered a stroke, and we also walked through that with her. As a single girl alone in Los Angeles, these relationships were very important to me. Many of them were at my wedding, even though we had ceased working together long before then. So, I was blessed to have that connection, and we remain friends to this day.
If Denise Prudhomme’s story is any indication, this no longer exists, and it’s an absolute detriment to our society.
Remote work, while sometimes a blessing and in certain arenas a necessity, has also done a number on our ability to interact face-to-face. The insane and unscientific COVID policies, where we were indoctrinated to believe our fellow human was a disease vector who wanted to kill us, are also to blame. Among the many horrors of that time was forcing people to die alone. This cavalier calculation is the direct result of the disconnection from our fellow man, and too much around us, including stupid social media influencers, encourages this. The most frightening aspect of our Brave New World is “AI friendships,” where people literally create via technology a person of their liking with whom they can interact and converse. A fully customized AI-being that mimics all the best aspects of a good friend, without the awkwardness, hiccups, and messiness of an actual flesh-and-blood relationship.
God help us.
If Denise Prudhomme had a family, I feel deeply sorry for them, and the grief they will have to go through knowing that their loved one died alone in such an undignified manner. In 2017, one of my sisters died in a similar fashion. Joan was recuperating from knee surgery at her apartment, where she lived with her cat. Despite entreaties for her to stay with our oldest sister, she wanted to be in her own bed with her pet, and preferred to communicate via texting and social media; so, family, friends, and coworkers regularly texted with her or talked to her over Facebook, and she always responded. However, when Joan stopped responding and no one had heard from her, family members called her phone, but no one was able to raise a response. My nephew called the police and they went to do a wellness check. Much like Denise Prudhomme, the authorities found her in a not-so-good state. Because we didn’t want to intrude and assumed she’d respond (because she always did), Joan had been deceased for several days before she was found. Was it our fault? Maybe. It still saddens me to this day that she died without any family around that could have potentially helped her, and maybe prevented her death.
It has made me more cognizant and committed to force myself from reliance on devices as the only means of communication and to eschew living an isolated life. Trust me, this gets harder as I get older, and has become a new layer of challenge now that we’ve moved to a new state without relatives or long-time friends close by.
I work from wherever I am, and my husband travels for work; so, I spend the lion’s share of my days in solitude. I am in the process of setting up safeguards to try and avoid circumstances like my sister’s or Denise Prudhomme’s.
- I have given permission for friends to call me out of the blue.
- I have given certain people permission to come by without announcement.
- I regularly attend church and have consistent workout times at my boxing gym. If I am going to be gone for a period of time, I let family, church friends, and those gym friends know.
- There’s a proverb that says, “It’s better to go to a neighbor than to a brother who lives far away.” My immediate family is too far away to assist in an emergency, so I touch base with my neighbor across the street and next door; we watch out for each other.
- A nearby friend, along with my husband, has medical authority for my care.
I also let people know about what’s going on with my health, and have even written about my health challenges and journey, some on this site. I have had three sisters pass untimely, each under different circumstances. Joan’s twin June battled T-cell lymphoma for a number of years, and the cancer, coupled with the failed treatments, ultimately wore her down. At one of the memorials for her, a co-worker of hers said, “I didn’t even know she was sick.” I recognize that this was my (now deceased) mother’s insistence that we not tell everyone our business, and to some degree that is wise advice.
However, you not only need the support of your closest communities in battling illness, but you may also need their assistance if things go south. If I am at work and suddenly lose consciousness or suffer an attack, I want someone there who knows that I suffer from X, Y, Z ailments, who might be able to give assistance. It’s important to build that trust and let people in.
And therein lies the rub. Building connection and letting people in becomes difficult when you cannot get people out of their cubicles or away from their screens. But doing so could mean the difference between life and untimely death; and in the event of death, that you won’t have to face it alone.
