How big is your office – check who was dead yesterday!

When George Turklebaum, 51, a proof-reader at a New York firm of medical publishers sat at his desk for five days, only then did his fellow office workers noticed that he was actually dead. Probably that goes to show that it was a big organization with hundreds of people working.

Now with the Reserve Bank of India tightening norms before giving loans to businesses, unless they prove they are big enough to be able to repay, companies may use this tactic in their favour.

The entrepreneur can fight his case for a loan before the reluctant banker saying: “See, this employee was dead last week and we didn’t notice because our ACs were on 24 x 7 and we have too many employees with even more work to do!”

Now, for a company who can keep its air conditioning system running 24 hours and for a system so effective that the dead employee stayed a week without a stink, its owner will definitely have enough revenue to repay the loan…LOAN PASSED!

How about a daily report with a ‘dash’ marked against this dead employee’s name. Will this qualify for a business loan? After all we have so many employees that we can’t keep count of one and all…big enough to qualify for a loan?

Well, this is not a joke…this happened in an office I know very well, where an employee died in a road accident and nobody knew till a couple of days. Whether the HR department knew of the mishap was of course not known, but the fact that a mail was circulated to its employees apprising the incident speaks volumes of the insensitivity of certain people. And what’s more disturbing is the fact that the manager who had prepared the daily report after his death was cheeky enough to put a dash against his name. Thankfully though he didn’t write “DEAD” as his comment/ remark. Sales and marketing guys are always capable of doing and writing such remarks!

We call ourselves a closely knit society. But then incidents like these go to show that we are worse than animals, to put it straight. Neither the dog nor the wild elephant will leave its dead. Well, humanity RIP!