Story time:

I once had a coworker who told me the story of someone who fell through the cracks and quite literally get lost in the bureaucracy of a fortune 50 company.

To set the stage, my coworker was an investigator who primarily focused on physical security, legal and HR investigations. We worked at a very large company (around 140,000 employees) and during the 90s/early 2000s one of the primary ways they grew was through mergers and acquisitions.

Well, during this time period the company went through an acquisition spree, purchasing hundreds, maybe even thousands of smaller companies in very high margin, specialty products. They would then optimize their costs (read: layoff a good portion of their workforce like R&D, HR, finance, IT) and basically let the product run the course and then sell it off for about 60-80% of what it paid for it once it no longer was profitable.

As you can imagine this could make things a bit chaotic at times, where people were coming and going all the time, with constant org-changes and layoffs happening all the time.

Meet Tom. Tom was came to work at this company in the late 80s after his small company was acquired by the large company. Tom had been working at the company ever since and when he hit his 20 years at the company, he opted to retire with a full pension. He did what every good employee does, notified his manager and let him know that at the end of the month he would be retiring.

The Executive VP whom Tom reported to, who had just started about 6 months earlier asked his admin "who the fuck is this guy, I don't know any Tom that works for me". The admin replied, actually he does report to you and he has been here for a very long time. The EVP was confused and asked what he did, which nobody could really answer. So he reached out to HR and was like "hey, I have no idea who this is or what they do, can you look into this?".

Tom had a very inflated title when his old company had gotten acquired. Something to the effect of "Senior VP, Engineering" but his role was effectively customer support, providing customer support for some legacy industrial systems that the company had manufactured and deployed in the 70s/80s. Right after the acquisition his immediate boss (the acquired companies old CEO) quit, which kicked off a bit of a perfect storm. After his boss left Tom was told that he would report to one of the executives, lets call him John, of the large company, while they figured things out and that he should coordinate with some of the other customer support people to align the way the work with their customers.

A few weeks later, John was then promoted to run one of the other divisions of the company as part of the yearly promotion/review cycle. Before John had moved on though, he had written the performance review for Tom which consisted of your doing a great job, keep working with the support team and going forward, they will have a better feel for your performance and manage your workload. When Tom tried to meet with his new boss, the new boss cancelled several meetings and then said "Just keep doing what your doing, only let me know if we have issues".

As the company bought and sold companies like playing cards, a culture of keeping your head low while looking busy took hold of the company and nobody wanted to be the sqeaky wheel about anything. Tom had a set of tasks and reports that he was responsible for and he worked diligently on those tasks.
Since there weren't any issues that he couldn't take care of, he never needed to meet with his direct manager. Other people in the company saw his title and who he reported to and generally thought he was some sort of bigwig and avoided talking to him for fear of getting on an executives radar. Each year, his boss would rate him as meets expectations and his admin assistant would ask the customer support people how he was doing, which would always respond with "no issues".

However, about 2-3 years after Toms old company was bought, they stopped selling the product and put the things Tom supported went into a maintenance only status. Weeks, months, years and then decades went by and every week Tom would sit in his office, waiting for support phone calls and deliver his report on Friday.

From the investigation, they had found that over the last 10 years that Tom was employed at the company there were only 2 customers who paid for support. 2 years before Tom retired, one of the customers didn't renew support and when they reached out to the other customer they responded "we have no idea what this is for, we just pay the invoices when we get them".

They estimated over the last 10-15 years at the company, that Tom worked approximately 20-30 minutes/week but had otherwise followed all company policies and procedures.