I’d like to imagine the Torchwood team is so catastrophically bad at internal management that there’s just… some guy on payroll they do not actually remember hiring.
Like a man named Jeff who got through orientation, saw one alien corpse twitch unexpectedly on a metal table, immediately decided “absolutely not,” and simply never came back to work again, yet continues receiving paychecks for YEARS because nobody at Torchwood has enough organizational stability to notice.
And the funniest part is I genuinely believe this could happen because which of these chucklefucks is realistically auditing employee attendance.
Jack Harkness absolutely would not notice. Half the time he barely seems aware of what day it is.
Toshiko Sato would probably notice discrepancies eventually but immediately assume Jack knows about it because surely there’s no way the organization is that dysfunctional. Surely Jeff is on some classified long term assignment. Surely there is a system here. There is not.
Owen Harper is simply not paying enough attention to anything around him for this to register as unusual unless Jeff is actively on fire.
Gwen Cooper might question it at first, but she’s also new enough to assume this is one of those weird Torchwood things she just hasn’t acclimated to yet. Like “okay apparently there’s a Jeff who’s never here but everyone acts like that’s normal, maybe he’s undercover in space or trapped in another dimension or something.”
And Ianto maybe knows. But the idea of this random civilian continuing to siphon government money from Torchwood simply because nobody can get their act together enough to realize he vanished is so deeply funny to him that he refuses to say anything.
