I used to work in this private company that was created by a few major banks in Canada. We did back end work to store certain encrypted information for them.
This was 2015.
Anyway, this Architect who was 45 years old was often in meetings I was in because we were working on the same project. The bank client we were working with is incredibly demanding and hard to deal with. It was common to have meetings well after 7 pm local time.
One night, we all finished work and went back home at 5 pm. By 6:30 I got a message to join a meeting immediately because some executive on the client’s side was having a chronic meltdown.
We SCRAMMED on the call and after realizing that there were no issues from our end, it was a third party vendor that they insisted on using that was causing THEM issues. We were trying to explain but the clueless boomer on their end was too ancient to process the information. Their Developers and QA seemed to understand us well though. Anyway, 30 minutes into the call and suddenly the Architect stops talking completely.
Everyone is like “Hello…? hello…?” Texting, calling his cell, emailing. Not a thing!
We figured it was just some internet disconnection issue so we proceeded best we could without his part.
Next day he doesn’t come to work. The day after they did a meeting and said he passed away. They tried to conceal it but eventually his obituary hit the net and the family was asking people to make donations to a Suicide Prevention organization.
His friend also later confirmed that his wife said he straight up hung himself while on the call.
I quit that job long ago. I cried a lot there too and I suffered mentally as well. The money wasn’t worth it for sure. I still think about him here and there even though we barely knew each other outside of those stress ridden meetings. May he rest in peace