According to her tombstone, she was born in 1966, and died in 2003.

During a 2007 Writer’s Block Question and Answer session at The Office Convention, the writers half-jokingly suggested that the original reason for the camera crew filming the staff’s lives was to see how the Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch handled the suicide of a co-worker (that employee being Tom Peets), but the crew changed its focus upon realizing that the daily events in the office would make a more captivating documentary.

In a 2008 Office Comic Con panel, it was revealed that Fern is gay, and writer Lester Lewis stated that he portrayed the character’s boyfriend, but that his part was cut.

In a deleted scene from the next episode, she is upset that Jim is now acting awkwardly around her, though a talking-head interview shows that she is still under the delusion that she has a chance at a romantic relationship with him. In a subsequent interview with the object of her affection, Jim tells the camera crew that he thinks she is “crazy”. However, in “Last Day in Florida”, it appears that she may no longer care for Jim, as she laughs along with Dwight when Dwight repeatedly insults him (although, it is also possible that she was only doing this because Dwight was vice president to Nellie Bertram at the time). She is not shown returning from Florida with her co-workers, and in the next episode, her desk appears to be cleaned out. On March 19, 2012, Broad confirmed that Cathy would not be returning, stating, via a Twitter message, that “Cathy has finished [temping] at Dunder Mifflin”.

Nate N. Nickerson (Mark Proksch) is a dimwitted, but well-meaning, warehouse worker, who used to be Dwight’s handyman. He is introduced in the opening to the season 7 episode “Sex Ed”, when Dwight hires him from a group of undocumented immigrants day laborers and has him remove a hornet’s nest from the Dunder Mifflin parking lot (which he attempts to do using a blowtorch and then a baseball bat, leading to him getting severely stung). Nate responds to Dwight in very broken Spanish when the two first meet, though later on he seems to have become more fluent when he translates for Dwight in “Jury Duty”. In “WUPHF.com”, he helps Dwight run the Hay Place attraction in the parking lot. In “China”, he helps Dwight turn the office toilet paper to half-ply as a cost-cutting measure, and goes with him to check out the “new building” that Pam claims to have found. In the opening of “Classy Christmas”, he takes the staff Christmas photo. Nate re-appears in the season 8 episode “Lotto”, where he applies for a warehouse position with Dunder Mifflin after the rest of the warehouse staff quits. It is revealed in this episode that he has a hearing problem. He is seen working in the warehouse in “Doomsday”. He also appears in several episodes in season 9, including the series finale, though part of his performance in episode 9, “Dwight Christmas” was memory holed in 2020.