Chandler worked at Lubrizol for approximately two decades, through the late 1970s until 1997. During that period, he apparently performed competently enough to remain employed through whatever personnel changes and corporate shifts that large manufacturer underwent. Multiple co-workers later described him as highly intelligent and technically capable.
The social dimensions of his Lubrizol years were defined entirely by absence. He did not make friends. He did not maintain ongoing personal relationships with colleagues. He did not participate in the informal social life of a workplace — the lunches, the after-work drinks, the holiday parties beyond the minimum necessary — in any meaningful way.
He listed co-workers as his emergency contacts, not because he had relationships with those co-workers that would make them appropriate choices for that role, but because he had no other options. He had constructed a life in which emergency contacts, by definition, had to come from the only pool of people who knew him at all.
The fictional sister, “Mary Wilson” in Columbus — the claim he apparently made to establish some semblance of a family connection — is a telling detail. Emergency contact forms, hospital admissions, and various other administrative processes ask for next-of-kin information. A person who genuinely had no family might reasonably give a neighbor or longtime friend. A person who was hiding might give a fictional relative at a verifiable-seeming address. Mary Wilson at an address in Columbus, Ohio, was Chandler’s answer to the problem of being asked for family. That the address was fictitious — that there was no Mary Wilson, no sister at that location — was a detail that no one thought to check until after his death, when investigators were trying to distribute his estate.