Feeling Unappreciated At Work?!?!?

I got this from one of the guys in my shop.

If you feel unappreciated imagine how this guys family must have felt.

Well as most with any kind of common sense would suspect this is likely a false story, just another eRumor, urban legend or internet rumor. Either way a scary thought but worth a sick laugh.

George Turklebaum, R.I.P. From David Emery, Your Guide to Urban Legends and Folklore. FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

Worker dead at desk for 5 days
(Originally published 01/31/01)
I would be remiss if I let another week pass without commenting on the strange story of George Turklebaum.

Reports published in the British press and subsequently circulated on the Internet claim that Turklebaum, allegedly a proofreader in a New York publishing firm, sat stone-dead in his office chair for five days last October before his coworkers realized it.

This has aroused Yankee skepticism.

In England the item has appeared in the Birmingham Sunday Mercury, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Times of London, on the BBC and no doubt in other venues, but American newspapers have not, by and large, seen fit to propagate it.

As the story goes, 51-year-old George Turklebaum quietly suffered a fatal heart attack one day while working at his desk. Apparently none of his 23 coworkers thought it remarkable to see him slumped motionless in his chair for five days running, because Turklebaum kept mostly to himself and was the first to arrive and the last to leave the office every day.

It's the sort of scenario Somerset Maugham must have had in mind when he said, "Death is a very dull, dreary affair."

But let's be scientific. Medical examiners say that within three days after a person dies, the corpse should exhibit obvious signs of decay: swelling, discoloration, fluid leakage and that distinctive odor of death. It's unlikely those telltale symptoms would have gone unnoticed by Turklebaum's fellow employees on into the fifth day postmortem.

Nevertheless, the Birmingham Sunday Mercury stands by its account. Proudly.

"We reported in December that New Yorker George Turklebaum had died at work — but none of his colleagues noticed for FIVE days," a follow-up article says. "We estimate that international interest in poor George's woeful tale means that more than 100,000 emails have now been sent from office worker to office worker."

"Of course the story is true," the Mercury continues — nevermind that the New York City white pages don't list a single Turklebaum in the region; the item came from a reliable source, a Big Apple radio station.

It's interesting to find the Sunday Mercury bragging as if it scooped the story, given that its first published report was dated December 17 and the Guardian had already run a briefer version two days earlier.

Among the colorful details we find in the Mercury's rendition is this closing tag: "Ironically, George was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died."

Does anyone besides me hear the phrase "too good to be true" ringing in their ears?

In any case, the Mercury does have it right when it boasts that Turklebaum-mania has swept the Internet in recent weeks. True or not, the story resonates with disaffected office workers everywhere. As one email correspondent put it, the tale bespeaks "a universal fear of being ignored (and unappreciated) in the workplace."

Not to mention a universal fascination with the macabre ... and the unlikely.

Update: After the above comments were published, the Birmingham Mercury offered an alternative explanation of where the Turklebaum story originated, claiming it was culled from the pages of the Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid renowned in the U.S. for its outrageous, credulity-defying "scoops" concerning human females impregnated by space aliens and the like. We have since confirmed that the item did, in fact, appear for the first time anywhere in the December 5, 2000 issue of WWN under the headline "Dead Man Works for a Week!"

Update: Via BBC News: In January 2004, the Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat reported — as factual — that a tax auditor in his late sixties keeled over at his desk in the Helsinki tax office and his dead body went undiscovered by coworkers for two days.

lagleRock Out!

Posted by SlagleRock at September 6, 2005 01:41 PM | TrackBack