@brappl there were no script errors about it and I did reset both towns with MC (one of these produced weird Woohooer errors that I've never seen before, but that's another story) and by force of habit I clear the caches before starting each game

@Igazor hmmmm that actually makes a lot of sense, I've never thought about the work hours including two different days. Since they all start at 11 pm, I'll have to go back and check if the "missing work" thingy appears after midnight or at the start. It would be a shame if that's the problem, though, since it's probably my fav of all the rabbithole jobs. I just love dastardly sims

I don't have and have never used Shimrod's mod, and the problem persisted both before branching at level 6 (or something) and after, with the Evil branch. I don't have DE either, I reset the towns via MC, but I'm not opposed to getting it if it will fix things, and I think they had both previously traveled to Uni and France maybe.

I didn't try bulldozing and replacing the lots, will do. At first I thought it might be something with the rabbithole rug glitching out, but then the Bridgeport one happened and it's plain old regular thing, not even a combo.

@Chain_Reaction you're probably right about the underlying issues, unfortunately, that save has broken like 17 times before and I keep portering my sims into fresh ones... This one was relatively new though, whyyyyy... why does the game hate them in particular? I think it senses when you have a favourite and that's the one more likely to break.
And on the topic of inappropriate clothing choices, have this front desk worker and what the game declared her career outfit - sure, casual's one thing, but I think that might be overdoing it a bit:
http://tinypic.com/r/24majyv/9 (she was probably coming from the same party brappl's fireman was at before work, lol)

DE itself is harmless as far as mods go. It's merely an interface into commands that EA left in the game but with no other way for players to access them. Some of its commands can do bad and unexpected things, we don't even know what many of them do (probably no one does at this point), but some of them are extremely helpful.
<a href="http://nraas.wikispaces.com/DebugEnable ... actions</a>

My top three favorites:
Fix Homeworld - the one just mentioned. This isn't a reset of any kind, it realigns sims homeworlds that sometimes get mixed up after travel, moving, and MC Add Sim type commands that can leave sims unable to go to work/school in what really is their homeworld. It reports on how many sims are fixed, if zero then it reports that.

Fix Invisible Sims - re-attaches the outfit assignments on sims where it finds something wrong with them, this is where we often see sims appearing as thought bubbles coming out of the ground or as bicycles that are riding themselves down the street. Again, if it finds nothing to fix it does nothing. When run on City Hall, it checks the entire town. Doesn't seem to catch all of them when this happens, but quite a few.

Object Reset (on a sim) - this is the gentlest kind of sim reset. Unlike MC or testingcheats resetsim, this one merely clears the sim's action queue but nothing else. Sometimes the sim may appear to jump to one side. Incredibly useful from stopping guests from doing unwanted things when you see they are about to, standing in the way of weddings or hogging all the wedding cake, and breaking into even active sims' queues that have a game generated action which cannot be otherwise canceled with no harm to the sim and no sending them home or off the map.

Oh, and just to clarify on the overnight shift thing, this can happen where a sim works from say Monday night to Tuesday morning early am. But then Tuesday is also a workday for them (Tuesday night into early Wednesday morning). I think it's the second of those shifts that sometimes has the tendency to get goofed up, especially if they received a promotion in between or if they got dumped out of their workplace mid-shift the first time and we sent them back inside again.

Thanks, Igazor, just downloaded,put it in game and reset and fixed homeworld (0 things fixed, according to the report), now we wait until a day off shows up again to test. Otherwise they didn't have the issue during the workdays and even with the promotions haven't been dumped out so far, the problem was only on days off and holidays. Fingers crossed it works now, it's very annoying to have to manually alter their work performance every time.

Oh I somehow missed the part about it being their day off. Don't think the new version would be causing that. Nothing changed in that code. It might be SP or EA bugs causing that.

Well it seems to have resolved itself, for now - hopefully it's permanent wouldn't surprise me if it's an EA thing, since I don't use any story progression at all. Thank you all for your input.