‘She Really WAS in a Ditch Somewhere’: People Share the Most Unbelievable Work Absence Excuses That Turned Out to Be True

A thread on r/AskReddit on Oct. 24, 2026, asks users for the most unbelievable late excuse that proved true. The thread gathered more than 7,800 upvotes and 2,100 comments at the time of publication.

One commenter described a junior employee who remained engaged with work despite a medical emergency. They wrote, “We had an intern who was pretty great.” The intern was hired full time and promoted, they said, then missed a day of work without calling. “There was a big meeting for one of his projects that afternoon though, and he dialed in on the conference call,” they wrote.

“Said his girlfriend had brought him his laptop but he was having some trouble typing,” the commenter wrote. A constant beeping could be heard in the background, and when a colleague asked about it, the intern said, “Oh that’s just the heart monitor or something.”

They added, “Dude had literally called into a meeting from his hospital bed after surgery.” The coworkers visited him after work. “He had been climbing and fell off of a cliff,” the commenter wrote, adding that the intern had undergone surgery. “We had to make him promise to forget about work for a bit."

Another commenter described an employee’s unexplained absence and the serious reason behind it. “I ran a restaurant, but obviously I couldn’t be there,” they wrote, explaining that they were home sick. “Apparently one of my employees had been a no call no show for the past 2 days.”

They said the employee phoned from a hospital. “She called me from the hospital to inform me she had been hit by a train and had just finally woken up,” they wrote. “My boss kept going on about how unprofessional it was that she had no called no showed. I was like dude she had just woken up after 3 surgeries and still has a dozen more to go through.”

“We’re fairly certain that she ended up dying,” they added. The boss held her job for months. “It was supposed to be her second day when she got hit by that train,” they wrote.

One commenter described a teacher whose planned absence came with an unusual assignment from law enforcement. “Had a teacher tell us he would be absent the next week because he had to go to Arkansas to ‘cook meth’ for the cops,” they wrote.

They said teaching was a side job. “Teaching was his side job, his primary job his regular job was as engineer for an environmental cleanup company,” they wrote. “He was going to show Arkansas cops what to look out for when entering a meth cooking house. From his description the methods used to cook meth in Arkansas were very likely to result in an explosion."

A separate reply described a missed shift during winter weather because of an accident. The commenter said a pharmacy technician did not call or come in on a day with snow and sleet. A coworker said, “She better be in a ditch somewhere.”

The commenter said the technician had slid off the road into a ditch. “She even had a nasty concussion, and her phone broke,” they wrote. “So, she really WAS in a ditch somewhere. Our pharmacy manager told the other girl to be careful what she wished for."

The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify the accounts described in the thread. The details above reflect the commenters’ accounts as shared on r/AskReddit. The commenters’ identities and the people and events they described have not been confirmed.