Taxman dies unnoticed at desk (NOT the FReeper)

Yeah, I have a friend, who has a friend in Helsinki, Juuro Vaanta who said that this didn't happen.

My source is as bogus as yours.

Spent two days in Helsinki, cold, rainy and wet and cold and rainy. Didn't do much sightseeing. ...

The guy was a government employee.

So the only way his co-workers knew he was dead was that he wasn't taking breaks every 4 hours, as the law allows.

Fiona, good to see you online. Can you drop me a freepmail?

Taxman -- glad to hear this wasn't you (worried for a second!)

This headline gave me a few more gray hairs...

So the only way his co-workers knew he was dead was that he wasn't taking breaks every 4 hours, as the law allows.

You mean every 4 hours he was expected to stop what he was doing and work for 15 minutes?

Walter Williams even fell victim to the Urban Legend the week before last....

Well you know what they say...

Silence is golden...

...ducking...

".. take a break every four hours."

Wow, the Finns have it rough... here in the US for most Federal employees it's do a little WORK every four hours, then go back to break.

Guess what? After a few hours, all the blood in the body goes to the lowest spot. Then after about 12-15 hours rigor mortis sets in, then, after about another day, bloating and distention occurs, the body becomes freakishly large, due to all them bacteria and crap that are eating all the insides up and expelling gas and all that other nasty stuff. Of course, well before this disgusting stage, the body (figure on about 160 lbs of meat) starts to smell, bad, real bad, so bad that anyone within about 30 or so feet would say "Damn, what the hell is that terrible smell? It smells like a dead person who is distended and rotting away?"

Think, use common sense, do the math....its Urban Folklore.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3410547.stm

It may be an Urban Legend, but BBC has picked up the story, and my favorite Urban Legend site references the BBC article, and is not calling it an urban legend for now.

That wouldn't be snopes, would it?

Maybe they were keeping the office real cold to conserve energy. It is Finland, after all.

I believe that Mythbusters did the research on this, didn't happen.

Why? The name of the man? The name of the company? Street address? And, the fact that it is in an obscure place like Finland?

Watch, in three months the same story will occur in Durban, or in Kolkata, or Montevideo...

So one grim reaper meets another.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

Mark Twain

I've been to Europe. Everyone there stinks.

Maybe it was you that stunk....

I've been to Dallas, everyone was a 'tard...

From Snopes' Urban Legend Site

Claim: A man who died at his office desk went unnoticed by his co-workers for five days.
Status: False.

Example: [Sunday Mercury, 17 December 2000]

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 proof-reader 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.

'He was always absorbed in his work and kept much to himself.'

A post mortem examination revealed that he had been dead for five days after suffering a coronary. Ironically, George was proof-reading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died.

Variations: In March 2001,
a slightly-rewritten version began circulating on the Internet, this one transforming dear dead George into a geologist working for an oil company in Calgary, Alberta. One especially adorable difference between this version and the earlier incarnation is the closing comment by Turklebaum's boss, Elliot Wachiaski, which attempts to explain why no one noticed Turklebaum's deceasitude: "Besides he was a geologist, they never really do much anyway."

Origins: What a fable for our times! Nearly all of us feel we're spending too much time at our jobs, are anonymous cogs in corporate machines whose disappearance (or death) would scarcely be noticed by our co-workers and employers, and are spending our lives at work (literally).

So of course people took to the story of poor dead-but-undiscovered George Turklebaum, which the Birmingham [England] Sunday Mercury claimed to have broken when they reported his death as a "Crazy Worlds" item on 17 December 2000 (even though the same item, minus some of the details, had been run by The Guardian and the BBC a few days earlier). The story of Turklebaum's tragic demise was picked up and printed by several other newspapers in Great Britain (including the London Times) in December and January and soon garnered a tremendous amount of attention (especially in Birmingham, Alabama, as confused readers mistakenly bombarded that city's newspapers with queries about Turklebaum). In response to all the inquiries they received, on 28 January 2001 the Sunday Mercury published the following:

Well of course the story is true!
The Sunday Mercury's Crazy World spots are compiled by journalist Keith Chalkley -- a man with a Midas touch for finding strange goings-on in every corner of the globe.

Keith said: 'I was first alerted to George's story by a New York radio station I broadcast to.

'But New York police, to whom I spoke, say the case isn't as odd as people might think.

'In 1975, an insurance clerk with a firm in Manhattan died in his workplace -- and it was 18 DAYS later that it was found that he was dead.'

What satisfied the Sunday Mercury didn't satisfy us, and it shouldn't have satisfied anyone else:
Even though the supposed bucket-kicking took place in New York, it wasn't reported in any American newspaper at the time of Turklebaum's demise. Forget about an obituary showing up; not even a news report about an unnamed dead person discovered sitting at a desk for five days made the news. New York papers aren't so jaded that they wouldn't run such an item if they'd been alerted to one. (Several other foolhardy publications later printed the same story, having convinced themselves that its appearance in a British paper constituted diligent fact checking, but those accounts shouldn't be confused with contemporaneous news reports of a man's death.)

This item came from only a few sources (who ran essentially the same story), all of them in England, even though the death supposedly occurred in New York City.

The identification of the dead man's employer was too vague (a "publishing firm" in New York) to allow for verification.

The Sunday Mercury's source for the story was said to be "a New York radio station," which is not exactly the most reliable of sources. (Just think of how much misinformation Paul Harvey has spread via the radio over the years, all by himself.)

Even the Sunday Mercury didn't say that New York police actually confirmed the story; only that they maintained "the case isn't as odd as people might think." (As it turned out, even the police quote wasn't really a quote at all, but a line taken from a made-up tabloid story.)

A spokesperson at the New York Medical Examiner's office neither remembered the case nor was able to turn up information on the death of anyone named Turklebaum for 1999 or 2000.

A search of the Social Security Death Index unearthed no information about anyone named Turklebaum.

Last but not least, the process of decomposition of human remains is such that a dead body could not have sat unnoticed for five days unless it were it a sealed, completely unused area of a building.
This one was a hoax, no matter how the Sunday Mercury tried to spin it. They (and others) got suckered by a 5 December 2000 article from the Weekly World News (a supermarket tabloid), which was almost word-for-word identical with the version they printed:

(Notice that the Sunday Mercury's follow-up "This really is true!" article quotes their "reporter" as having spoken to the New York police and been told that "the case isn't as odd as people might think" and that "in 1975, an insurance clerk with a firm in Manhattan died in his workplace — and it was 18 DAYS later that it was found that he was dead" — information straight from the concluding paragraph of the Weekly World News piece.)
The Turklebaum saga is a prime example of why we stress repeatedly that the appearance of a news story in one or more newspapers (even respected publications such as the London Times) is no guarantee of its truthfulness. Extraordinary news requires extraordinary documentation, which is something more than a bevy of newspapers simply running the same unsourced piece.

Sightings: A June 2000 Conseco television commercial anticipated (and maybe even have inspired) this fake news story about George Turklebaum. The ad showed an unmoving man wearing sunglasses seated at a desk. Throughout the day various assignments were placed on his desk and then picked up, completed, and dropped back at his desk by co-workers. At the end of the day the wife appears to pick him up. She is complimented on her husband’s diligence and performance, shoos the appreciative co-worker away, closes the door to her husband's office, and begins to prepare him to leave. The voice-over on the commercial comments on how it's important to be prepared for the unexpected, leaving behind the unstated message that otherwise you too might have to day after day prop your dead husband at his desk at work to keep those paychecks coming in.

In January 2004, several news outlets picked up a similar story from the Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat, which claimed that a tax office official in Finland died at his desk, but his death went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.

Last updated: 19 January 2004

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by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
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Sources:
Beatty, Jim. "We Started It! World Goes Crazy for George E-Mail."
[Birmingham] Sunday Mercury. 28 January 2001.

Buse, Uwe. "Der Scheintote."
Der Spiegel. 14 May 2001 (p. 72)

Norman, Matthew. "Diary."
The Guardian. 15 January 2001.

Robidoux, Carol. "The Legend of George Turklebaum: An American Tragedy."
The Bucks County Courier Times. 31 March 2001.

BBC News. "Finns Miss Death in Tax Office."
19 January 2004.

[Birmingham] Sunday Mercury. "Worker Dead at Desk for 5 Days."
17 December 2000.

Weekly World News. "Dead Man Works for a Week!"
5 December 2000.

Time will tell. Heaven knows that no one ever dies at their desk, besides Karl Marx. ;-)