THE latest urban myth doing the rounds has skidded across my desk. It sets a new low in depressing for those of us who've ever set our sights on a death not involving the office cleaner.
Citing a Birmingham newspaper, the yarn goes: “Bosses of a publishing firm are trying to work out why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for five days before anyone asked if he was feeling okay.
“George Turklebaum, 51, who had been employed as a proofreader at a New York firm for 30 years, had a heart attack in the open-plan office he shared with 23 other workers. He quietly passed away on Monday, but nobody noticed until Saturday morning when an office cleaner asked why he was still working during the weekend.
“His boss Elliot Wachiaski said ‘George was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything’. A post-mortem examination revealed that he had been dead for five days after suffering a coronary. George was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died.”
Hmm . . . now, see, I could believe this if it happened at a newspaper. Not because I don't think my colleagues wouldn't wise up when a George type failed to speak, eat, use the bathroom or move for a week.
But the thing is, decomposing folk tend to be a bit, well, on the nose.
And newspaper folk long ago worked out it's best to leave their sniffing gear at the door.
A little-known fact is that newspapers are actually killing grounds for all manner of decomposing objects, such as columnists. But they also
specialise as a portal for food and beverage products evolving to the next level of consciousness.
For instance, true story, last month a junior colleague filling in for a senior writer, who shall remain nameless, gamely decided to clean his desk, which had not seen oxygen in its purer form for some years.
She discovered two meat pies, in various stages of decomposition, which had been bought and sauced up ready to eat, but never were consumed.
As time went by, papers got filed on top of them. Today, just as you can tell when world cataclysms have struck by looking at the rings on a tree, we could determine from the cross-section of our colleague's paper stack at what times in any given year he had become too busy to eat and had filed his food instead.
(In the interests of hygiene, we felt it necessary to burn his desk and sterilise the junior writer. Or it may have been the other way around.)
But I digress. I think there are three lessons we can take from the myth of the hapless George:
One, live for the now - death by medical text proofreading is totally uncool.
Two, if it smells dead, it might not just be that pate from lunch.
And, finally, be kind to your cleaners, for one day they may have to identify your body.
#Not its actual title, but it’s what a boss said dourly
about this column before pulling it from publication. *grin*
Ya win some, you lose some…
Written for January 13, 2001. © Sheryl-Lee Kerr