Joyce Mrema looked at her screen twice before she looked at Mariam.
“According to my system, you are active.”
Mariam sat in the plastic chair in front of the HR desk. The office was tucked above dispatch, cooler than the rest of the depot, with an air conditioner that clicked on and off and a printer that seemed to sigh every few minutes. On the wall, a company poster listed attendance rules, safety procedures and grievance steps in cheerful colors.
“Active means what, exactly?” Mariam asked.
“Employment status. No termination. No suspension. No unpaid leave request.”
“And attendance?”
Joyce opened another system. Her expression shifted.
“This one shows absences.”
“Twenty-four hours.”
Joyce glanced up. “You saw the payslip?”
“I brought it.”
Mariam placed a printed payslip on the desk, then her notes from the security logs, the IT ticket and Victor’s email. She did not dump them in a pile. She arranged them by date.
Joyce picked up the payslip. “Attendance comes from gate access.”
“That is the problem.”
“If your card scans, the system creates the timestamp. If it doesn’t—”
“Security entered me manually.”
Joyce frowned. “The visitor log does not feed payroll attendance.”
Mariam went still.
“So my card was disabled. Security let me in manually. Payroll then decided I was absent because the disabled card did not scan.”
Joyce spoke more slowly now. “That appears to be what happened.”
“Who disabled the card?”
“That is not on my HR screen.”
“The IT ticket says operations-owner confirmation.”
Joyce typed the ticket number into her system.
The desk phone rang. She answered, told the caller she would ring back and replaced the receiver. Something in the room had changed. Joyce was no longer listening to a complaint. She was reconciling records that contradicted each other.
“Tell me the days you reported,” she said.
Mariam opened her notebook. “Monday, 06:46, manual entry. 06:49, security override. Tuesday, manual entry again. Wednesday too. Hamisi and others saw me on the floor, but I do not want memory if a log exists.”
Joyce printed the attendance export.
MONDAY: ABSENT. TUESDAY: ABSENT. WEDNESDAY: ABSENT.
“Exactly twenty-four hours,” Joyce said.
“Yes.”
Joyce called Bakari at the gate and asked whether the manual log had been retained. She did not feed him answers. She asked for Monday’s entry time. Bakari confirmed it. Joyce wrote across the attendance printout: SECURITY MANUAL ENTRY EXISTS — VERIFY ALL DATES.
For the first time in days, Mariam felt one department connect itself to another instead of sending her away.
“When was your card disabled?” Joyce asked.
“I discovered it Monday. I have reason to believe the request existed Friday.”
“What reason?”
Mariam paused. She was not going to spend Hamisi’s name before he had agreed.
“I have a firsthand source who is not ready to enter the formal record. For now, I want your records first.”
Joyce studied her, then nodded. “Fair.”
Mariam slid over the Upendo Pharmacy notice.
“This went out Friday. The client was told Denis would take my account. Monday my card failed. Payroll then deducted attendance for days I was inside the depot.”
“What did Victor say about your role?”
Mariam handed over the email summary and his reply.
Joyce read the final line aloud. “No formal change has been made to your employment at this time.”
“In your system, that is true,” Mariam said. “But one system removes my access, another keeps paying me, and a third marks me absent. Which one am I supposed to believe?”
Joyce did not answer immediately.
Below the window, a truck sounded its horn twice. Beyond it, the roofs and workshops of the Vingunguti industrial belt shimmered in the heat. Life kept moving while Mariam’s status remained split across three systems.
“I am opening an HR case,” Joyce said.
“I need a case number and a receipt.”
“All right.”
“And the salary correction?”
“I can request attendance correction, but because the access status is disputed, finance may hold the adjustment until the investigation is complete.”
“Meaning the next payroll can be affected too?”
“I do not want to promise it cannot.”
“Then write that financial harm has already occurred.”
Joyce did.
She opened the attendance workflow and showed Mariam how the gate scan generated a timestamp that payroll collected automatically every night. Normally the automation saved time. In Mariam’s case, one access decision had silently become a payroll decision without anyone sitting down to make it.
Mariam pointed at the screen. “So every department trusts the previous input.”
“Mostly.”
“And manual security entries require a person to reconcile them?”
“They should.”
“Put that in the case.”
Joyce added another note.
“Even if we fix yours,” she said, “that gap remains for the next person.”
“That is why it belongs there.”
They went through the discrepancy sheet line by line. Mariam rejected the phrase manager intentionally blocked access.
“You do not know that?” Joyce asked.
“I know access was disabled before or around the role reassignment. I do not know the authorization source yet.”
Joyce rewrote the sentence.
“Most people who reach this desk want motive in the record.”
“Motive can wait. My salary cannot.”
Joyce gave a tired smile. “I’ll remember that.”
The printer finally produced the case intake. Joyce signed it, wrote the case number at the top and passed Mariam her copy.
Mariam placed it carefully into the blue file.
Joyce kept looking at the screen.
“Wait.”
“What?”
She opened the employment-action history. Promotion. Salary adjustment. Department mapping.
At the bottom was a field Joyce clearly expected to contain something.
“Interesting.”
Mariam leaned forward.
Joyce printed one more receipt and touched the line with her finger.
`Termination action: NONE`.
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