lol. You have one guess to figure out where this came from.
NEW YORK — The owners of a publishing firm are trying to figure out why
no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his
desk for five mind-boggling days before anyone asked if he was feeling
O.K.
Authorities say George Turklebaum, 51, who had been employed as a
proofreader for 30 years, suffered a massive heart attack in the
well-lighted, open office he shared with 23 other workers on the 18th
floor of a high-rise in Manhattan.
A postmortem examination indicates that he passed away on a Monday morning
and remained sitting upright at his desk, his head tilted slightly forward
over a reference book he appeared to be checking.
But nobody noticed that anything was amiss until Friday night, police
reports say.
Turklebaum’s boss, Elliot Wachiaski, says: “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.
“He was always absorbed in his work and kept to himself. Some people
thought he was a little spooky, but I always considered him a good
employee to have around.”
A co-worker who asked not to be identified says she “noticed a peculiar
odor” and “some kind of fluid” around Turklebaum’s desk on Thursday and
Friday but decided “something in his trash basket was leaking or maybe he
hadn’t bathed that morning.”
“I saw a silverfish on his neck but I was too embarrassed to say anything.
All I could think was, ‘How can people let their personal hygiene go like
that?’ ”
Another colleague chimes in: “George was one of these people you see but
you don’t see. They aren’t very friendly, and after the first few times
you say ‘Hi’ or try to engage them in small talk and they ignore you, you
stop trying and just look the other way.”
A supervisor adds: “George was a loner for sure. He didn’t have a wife, a
girlfriend, any family, or even any friends that I’m aware of.
“So nobody on the outside would have noticed that he had gone missing.
“Here in the office, I remember thinking the week of his death that I
hadn’t even seen him get up to go to the rest room or get coffee.
“I just assumed he was working especially hard on the rather large text he
was proofing.”
In a crowning irony, Turklebaum was proofreading manuscripts of medical
textbooks when he died, official reports say.
In fact, the reference book found open on his lap was a medical text that
was open to a section on heart attack. Turklebaum’s boss says he may have
been fact-checking a chapter of the manuscript he was proofing: *CPR
Revisited: Reviving the Stopped Heart*.
A cop who was among the first to arrive at the scene calls Turklebaum’s
death “bizarre.”
“After three days or so these bodies start stinking up the place pretty
bad, and they usually fall over,” she says. “But this guy was propped
perfectly upright.
“To tell you the truth, until I got close enough to smell him, I didn’t
think he was the dead man — I thought he was a co-worker or an
eyewitness.
“He really did look alive.”