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The Case of the Mysterious Second Monitor

· 3 min read

In a bland hybrid office, where desks change hands like trading cards at lunch, an unsolved mystery emerged: Desk 14’s second monitor was vanishing every Monday.
No one could explain why a screen that had been neatly plugged in the previous week would simply poof away—no cables left tangled, no scorch marks, nothing but an empty chair. IT replaced it, but the replacement disappeared the following week. Rumors swirled: Desk 14 was cursed.

The plot thickened when security footage finally revealed the culprit: a square‑shaped backpack from Accounting, slipping past the hallway cameras on Friday nights. The man in question wasn’t even scheduled to be in the office that day. He’d been sneaking in after everyone else left, heading straight for Desk 14 to snatch the second monitor for his “home trading setup.”

After three months, he’d pilfered six monitors. When confronted, he claimed the screens weren’t assigned to anyone and that the first monitor was “too much work” to move. The company walked him out in an hour, and Desk 14 finally found its peace.

Comments (because everyone loves a good side‑story)​

  • “I know this is AI, but at my job we had a guy steal a monitor on Fridays, when caught he dropped the box on the ground and said “what monitor?””
    (Looks like the thief’s confidence level could have used an upgrade.)

  • “You can’t leave us hanging, did they get the monitors back or does he lose his job but still reap the benefits of his theft?”
    (The suspense is thicker than the office coffee.)

  • “In his defense, seeing a line perpetually go down looks less depressing if it's spread across 90 monitors.”
    (Who knew market crashes could be so visually soothing?)

  • “OMG, this reminds me of a co‑worker at my first job in the early 80's. He was quite a slimeball.
    Anyway, we moved from a rabbit warren in the NW corner of Toronto into a brand new shiny building in Brampton, and there were a lot of boxes of stuff that got moved. The contents were inventoried, but after a couple of weeks, they started noticing some hard drives were disappearing.
    Word got out in Engineering, and naive young me was shocked -- stealing from the company? The shocker came when we heard that there had been arrests after a search warrant had been executed. I immediately said, oh … J. R. Slimeball, right? Bang on.
    He and his accomplice (another co‑worker) had been walking out regularly with hard drives, electronic parts, and various bits and pieces for months. They were both immediately terminated.
    I just knew it was him. Some people.”
    (If only the office had a “Who stole the hard drives?” game board.)

  • “Did they recover them?”
    (The mystery continues… or did it? Only the IT gods know.)

TL;DR​

Friday night trader swipes monitors, gets caught, gets fired. Desk 14 finally stays monitor‑free. The office is safe, the monitors are back (or at least that’s the rumor), and everyone can finally focus on their actual work without the specter of a missing screen haunting their Mondays.