I had an assistant who didn't really need the job, but her parents forced her to have one. She was the youngest, and only girl, of a family of 5 siblings. All her older brothers worked at the race track that their family owned, and she was dating someone they didn't approve of. I liked her boyfriend, he seemed friendly and soft-spoken, but her folks were like "if you're going to date whom you want, you better have a job and live on your own." Well, one day, she got mad because I asked her to work a shift she didn't want to. So she simply didn't show up, which really fucked me over. So I called her up, pretty pissed. No answer.

She didn't show up for 3 days. So I fired her for job abandonment. She didn't really need the job, right? Her parents owned a racetrack.

A week later, her folks called me, and asked if I'd seen her. No, she didn't show up for work ever again. They panicked. "OMFG WE DON'T KNOW WHERE SHE IS!" They immediately assumed her BF kidnapped and/or murdered her. The police were called, an investigation was opened up. Her BF's address showed he'd moved away. I had to sit with the police and go through an interrogation about her last whereabouts. She became a missing person, and once a week for two months, her parents called and asked if I had heard anything. The detective called with more questions. Then her car was found in an impound lot: it had been abandoned and looted in a New Jersey parking garage. Then the calls petered off and stopped.

A year went by, and I assumed the worst.

One day, one of the employees in another store in the mall told me he saw her with her BF. I didn't believe them, but then other people said that they'd seen her, and corroborated some stories she told them. Apparently, she had been planning to run away for some time, and just ran away with her BF and went NC with her family. That didn't work out so well, because both had trouble finding jobs and then their car got carjacked. Both of them were forced to return home, and her parents were forced to reconcile that she was never going to leave her BF.

I was pretty pissed, though, that I thought she was dead.

Yesterday, I (sort of) learned the phrase "implication arrows," from which I learned that I should assume that this story is not true, though the arrows... Imply that it's true. I still don't really get it.

Anyway, I've never held a job where the employer would do more than the bare minimum required by law if I disappeared. Certainly not so much as contacting my family unless there were extenuating circumstances like me verifiably disappearing mid shift. I suspect this is true for most people.