Fired – And Arrested: For Stealing a Fake Doctors Excuse

A fake doctor's note can set you free.Marcel Johanssen (name changed) had planned the weekend of his life: Vegas with his buddies.

It was an amazing time. Drinking, gambling, strip clubs, women. The party never seemed to end, and Marcel didn’t want it to. So he decided to stay an extra day, and deal with work when he got home.

He went to work on Tuesday with a story about a bad case of the flu, but he’d used that excuse before and his boss wasn’t convinced. Marcel was given an ultimatum: either bring in a doctors letter to prove you were sick, or you’re fired.

Marcel had a lot of friends, but none of them were doctors. He didn’t know any doctors. In fact, he was only 26 and had hardly ever seen a doctor in his life, so he didn’t have a regular physician. There was no one he could call to explain that he was “sick” (but not sick enough to see a doctor) and needed a written excuse for his employer.

He needed his job in order to pay child support, so he couldn’t just walk away. He needed to find some way out.

That’s when Marcel made one good decision, and one bad one.

He realized that the only answer was getting a fake doctor excuse to give to his boss. That was the good decision. The bad one came when Marcel drew on the experience of his troubled teenaged years, and decided to steal a doctors pad and write his own excuse note.

There was a 24 hour clinic near Marcel’s apartment, which was busy all night but understaffed. He figured that if he sat in the clinic’s waiting room, he could wait until the staff was all busy with patients, find a way to sneak into one of the offices or examining rooms, and find some stationery, a prescription pad, or something that would be believable enough to let him write out a fake doctor note.

At first, things went pretty well. He waited until the clinic was full, found a chair near the hallway leading to the treatment area, and decided the time was right. He snuck down the hall into the first open room and closed the door. He looked around, but there were no pads, no stationery, nothing at all he could use. He started to panic, and went into the next room. Same story there, nothing had been left in the open to use for a fake excuse. Need a doctors note, go to our home page.

And when he tried a third room, Marcel’s grand plan fell apart. A doctor was sitting there. He took one look at Marcel and realized what was going on; he yelled, and Marcel ran – right into the arms of a security guard.

You can probably guess the rest of the story: the police, the court appearance, the suspended sentence with community service, and of course, the pink slip.

Marcel’s decision to use a fake doctors excuse wasn’t wrong. Obviously, his failure to find a reliable source for believable fake medical notes was about as wrong as could be. And he paid the price.