Posted on 08/13/2006 5:29:07 PM PDT by M. Peach
STOCKHOLM -- Idiots in the office are just as hazardous to your health as cigarettes, caffeine or greasy food, an eye-opening new study reveals. In fact, those dopes can kill you!
Stress is one of the top causes of heart attacks -- and working with stupid people on a daily basis is one of the deadliest forms of stress, according to researchers at Sweden's Lindbergh University Medical Center.
The author of the study, Dr. Dagmar Andersson, says her team studied 500 heart attack patients, and were puzzled to find 62 percent had relatively few of the physical risk factors commonly blamed for heart attacks.
"Then we questioned them about lifestyle habits, and almost all of these low-risk patients told us they worked with people so stupid they can barely find their way from the parking lot to their office. And their heart attack came less than 12 hours after having a major confrontation with one of these oafs.
"One woman had to be rushed to the hospital after her assistant shredded important company tax documents instead of copying them. A man told us he collapsed right at his desk because the woman at the next cubicle kept asking him for correction fluid -- for her computer monitor.
"You can cut back on smoking or improve your diet," Dr. Andersson says, "but most people have very poor coping skills when it comes to stupidity -- they feel there's nothing they can do about it, so they just internalize their frustration until they finally explode."
Stupid co-workers can also double or triple someone's work load, she explains. "Many of our subjects feel sorry for the drooling idiots they work with, so they try to cover for them by fixing their mistakes. One poor woman spent a week rebuilding client records because a clerk put them all in the 'recycle bin' of her computer and then emptied it -- she thought it meant the records would be recycled and used again."
Not if you kill them first.
Another stupid research project. The stress of dealing with others in omnipresent. Coworkers, neighbors, the public, people in the media, etc., etc.
A big AMEN to this one. But raising teenagers will do the same thing.
L
I quit a job in a bindery once because of the crack addicts working there. The owner was afraid he would be called a racist if he fired them.
Anyone who has ever worked with paper trimmers knows that they're dangerous enough without crackheads playing dangerous games while you're trying to operate the machines.
This is partly Micro$oft's fault for embracing political correctness. There is a way (obviously requiring lightyears more intelligence than these poor folks possess) to rename it to "Trash" or "Garbage" and apply it to every user profile.
Yes. That's why firing was invented.
It saves on Insurance costs.
I think so, after all it was in the Weekly World News. ; )
HA HA HA HA HA! I'm going to have to remember this one!
An accountant in Passamaquoddy had a coronary when a secretary said she believed a story written in the Weekly World News.
I work in an office of 12 people. There are no divas...but a new employee had to put toner in the copier...I showed her how. She shook toner all over the wall, all over the copier, all over the floor.
The next day she said to me, "It is totally inappropriate for me to be dealing with the copier."
HUH?
These people don't realize that stupid coworkers are there to entertain you. For example, see if you really can get your PHB to try to re-boot his laptop by holding it upside-down over his head and shaking it.
I was lured, by the V.P. that I would make the difference in the operation and be running it within one year as he weeded out the nincompoops he inherited, when he hired on. He left six months after he hired me, because he couldn't get the owners to make moves on friends that they had running the operation, basically working part-time while getting a full time salary
It is the absolutely most frustrating thing I have ever had to endure.
I almost hate having to go to work on Mondays knowing I will have to straighten out, correct, redo almost everything that will happen tomorrow.
BTW, I'm looking to get out ASAP.
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