Old Man Dies At His Desk At Work, Nobody Notices For 2 Days

BBC – A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk was not found by his colleagues for two days. The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday. The head of personnel at the office in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, said the man’s closest colleagues had been out at meetings when he died. He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful – and procedures would have to be reviewed. An anonymous government official told BBC News Online the man had been working in his own office with the door closed. “People thought he wanted to work in peace and no-one disturbed him,” the official said. He was found only when a friend called to have lunch with him. According to the Finnish tabloid newspaper Ilta-Sanomat on Monday, co-workers had assumed the dead man – a tax auditor – was silently poring over returns. “The reason for this was caused by many coincidences,” Anita Wickstroem, director at the Helsinki tax office, told AFP news agency. “He was very much working alone and often visiting companies, while his friends and colleagues who used to have lunch or coffee with him were busy in meetings or outside the office at the time,” she added. There were about 100 other staff in the auditing department on the same floor the dead tax official worked on. 

Here’s what I want every cube monkey to do right now: print this story out, and pin it up on your cubicle wall. Right behind your computer monitor. So that you always have a reminder of what not to become. This is it for Cube Monkey. This is the nightmare scenario. This is what happens when you let The Man win. You die at your desk and you are so insignificant, and have so few people in your life that your corpse sits there for 2  straight days. Theres not a single person in your personal life that notices you’re gone. Your job is so pointless and meaningless that nobody even notices it hasnt been done for days on end. You have so little contact with anyone from the outside world you die and nobody even knows it.

This is what you get for like 3 decades of loyal service in your cage. You come in early, stay late. Never take vacation, never mail it in. And then you know what happens? You actually become part of the cube. Your body fuses with the walls and you actually turn into part of the cubicle. Like the Borg in Star Trek. You’re actual wallpaper, and nobody even notices you, dead or alive, because you blend in with the walls of work.  Thats as depressing a thought as I can possibly conjure.

So remember the tale of the Finnish tax man who died on a Tuesday and nobody knew till a Thursday. Dont become that guy. Blow off work once in a while. Snake it as much as you can. Set the bar as low as possible. Because if you work as hard as you can this is your reward.