A man who managed to get away with skipping work for six years was finally caught out after he was ironically nominated for an award for his long service.
Joaquín García from Spain was a building supervisor for a water treatment plant in Cádiz and was employed by the local government for two decades. But then one day, the 69-year-old just stopped showing up to work and still took home his $49K annual salary-- something he was (impressively) able to keep up for six years.
Garcia was able to get away with it for so long because of the bureaucratic structure of the local government-- there was a miscommunication between two departments, with each department assuming the other was overseeing Garcia's work.
It was only when Garcia was nominated for an award for his 20 years of service to the company that his jig was finally up. "I wondered whether he was still working there, had he retired, had he died? But the payroll showed he was still receiving a salary," deputy mayor Jorge Blas told Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “I called him up and asked him, ‘What did you do yesterday? The month before, the month before that?’ He didn’t know what to say,” Blas added.
Consequently, Garcia was required to pay a $29K fine (the maximum allowed under Spanish law) for his lengthy absence on the job. To the end, Garcia denied the allegations and even wrote to the mayor to ask if he had to pay the fine. Garcia claimed he was bullied due to his family's politics and found there was no work to do at the water company-- to which he was originally assigned to be "out of the way." Reportedly, Garcia made the most of all the confusion, becoming an avid reader of philosophy and an expert on the works of Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher credited with laying the foundations of the Enlightenment.
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