alright.. this has been going on for too long. not that it's annoying or anything in particular, it's just... kind of weird, and i'd be interested to understand why this is happening.

random objects appear in the "I'm finished for the day!" popup that you would see a maid or other service worker say. a few months ago i also posted the picture with the plate saying its finished for the day but nobody seemed to say anything (although it wasn't posted as its own thread, so hopefully this will grab people's attention more).

see the attached pics to see what i'm talking about. it hasn't happened many times (perhaps 4-6 times) and i only have 3 pictures of them.

https://gyazo.com/25fb646f5073d64b7946705b692e9833
https://gyazo.com/3f9e79656493420d78748eb901c775bd
https://gyazo.com/d0d2be42d9b043c8f8cdab74d1b9b2ac

I do not see any pictures on your post.

a possible fix might be to change appearance of the characters through either mirror or hack. at least insimenator can do it without selecting the character.

for some reason it isn't letting me attach any pictures even though i attempted to twice. you can click on the gyazo links i just added, though

Wow, that is so weird, funny, sad. I hope someone fixes it for you.

It is just an icon, nothing to be concerned about. For most NPCs the message displays with the current object id as the icon for the message and although they set the current object id to be themselves at the beginning of their workday the odds are it'll often get changed as they interact with many other objects. To fix it would require a simple override of one op-code in each NPC template but that risks the game saving their character file in two parts (ie. N001_User00057.package and N001_User00057.1.package) so it's better to just ignore it.

Does that mean it's really common, then? I've never seen it.

I've never seen it either but mine nearly always use the 'Now that I'm done with work, would you like to hang out?' because they are always best friends with my girls. I took a look at the code on all of the NPCs that use that dialogue to see if it is something to be concerned about. Usually that sort of weirdness come about when using a neighbour Id instead of the sim Id but that is never the case. My guess is that because the NPC has to 'hold' the object id for so long any small glitch will cause it to be replaced with whatever object the NPC is currently interacting with.