Episode 206: Employee Sleepwalked Into Termination

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to another episode of What The Hell Just Happened?! Join Paul Edwwards and his guests as they discuss and sometimes even solve some interesting HR problems.

Paul: And… I’m gonna go off the rails sometimes and talk about whatever I want.

Ally: Hey, Paul.

Paul: Hey, Ally. Tell me, what the hell just happened in HR.

Ally: All right. Today we’ve got an interesting story that came through our compliance email, which is where our compliance team gets to nerd out and see all the new state laws that are coming through and the crazy stuff that has happened in H.R.

Paul: OK.

Ally: And so this one is about disabilities. And there was a female employee who went to a sales conference with a male employee. OK. And at the conference that evening, they kind of parted ways. They weren’t hanging out or anything. She went to dinner, I believe, with another female employee. So they weren’t. There was no interaction there. OK. Later that evening, the male employee gets a knock on his door, opens it.

Ally: The female employee is standing there in a bathrobe. She walks into his room. She gets into his bed. She pulls the covers up to her face and then becomes unresponsive. And so he then has to contact.

Paul: Wait wait, wait, wait, wait.

Ally: He, I told you, is alive

Paul: When he hears a knock, he opens door. She’s standing there in a robe. She walks by him. She gets into the bed. She pulls the covers up. And at that point, she’s no longer responding.

Ally: Yeah. At that point, he’s like she’s like, not interacting with him.

Paul: So he’s like, hey.

Ally: Yeah, you. What are you doing?

Paul: You do.

Ally: It right.

Paul: And she’s unresponsive, OK? Yeah.

Ally: So. So he has to call hotel security at this point, and they wait.

Paul: He his first move was to call hotel security because he had a fellow employee in his bed who was unresponsive.

Ally: Right. Because he couldn’t get her out.

Paul: He couldn’t get her out. So she was OK. I’m I’m going to I have a lot of questions.

Ally: I knew you.

Paul: This is killing me. I have so many questions. OK, I’ll just go settle down.

Ally: He calls hotel security. They come up and they you know, shake her awake, basically, and escort her back to her room. And the article said that obviously he also mentioned told Human Resources of their company about it. It didn’t say whether he, like, contacted someone right away that evening and was like, hey, emergency situation. I feel super helpful.

Ally: Yeah. Which I doubt. Yeah.

Paul: But the hotline, right? Like the emergency hotline. It’s like a bat. It’s Batman hotline straight into the head of HRT. Exactly. And it’s like, wait a minute, we have a problem.

Ally: And we’ve got an H.R. problem. OK, right. So, you know, this employee comes back to work. They put her on a paid leave. They’re like, hey, we need to figure out what happened. And they end up terminating her. OK. So right after the incident happened, this female employee contacted a doctor about this because she was like, this was super weird.

Ally: She wasn’t able to see this doctor until after she had already been terminated. So after the termination and after she eventually sees this doctor, she’s diagnosed with this sleepwalking disorder. Oh, wow. So then she she sues the company.

Paul: Saying, hey.

Ally: Hey, you violated the A.D.A. I have a disability. You fired me because of it.

Paul: Not the disability.

Ally: Itself. Right. Right.

Paul: And the employer at the time had no way of knowing that she had a disability Correct?

Ally: Yeah.

Paul: There’s no way to know because she didn’t know.

Ally: She. Yeah. Yeah.

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