December 18, 2000
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I received this from a friend today; Supposedly its from the THE SWAZI TIMES on Oct 16, 2000. It borders on the morbidly stupid and morbidly unbelievable. I really have nothing more to say about it, just read for yourself:
“For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient in the same bed every Friday morning”, a spokeswoman for the Mbabane Government Hospital told reporters.
“There was no apparent cause for any of the deaths and extensive checks on the air conditioning system and a search for possible bacterial infection, failed to reveal any clues.”
It seems that every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward, remove the plug that powered the patient’s life support system, plug her floor polisher into the vacant socket, then go about her business. When she had finished her chores, she would plug the life support machine back in and leave, unaware that the patient was now dead! She could not, after all, hear the screams and eventual death rattle over the whirring of her polisher!
“We are sorry and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question. Furthermore, the Swazi Health and Welfare Department is arranging for an electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of this incident. The inquiry is now closed.”
By the way, the headline of the newspaper story was: “CLEANER POLISHES OFF PATIENTS”
Comments (8)
<< We are sorry and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in question >>
Well, glad that’s all cleared up!
This reminds me of an article I once read called “When Interfaces Kill“. If this story is true, I don’t fault the poor cleaning lady at all… the hospital should have set up an easy-to-use (and non-terminal) method for even less-educated individuals to clean the floors.
As the friend that sent this article to Monsur, i felt (in retrospect) that i needed to do some research on this (somewhat) atrocious report. The fruits of my labor: http://www.emergency-nurse.com/legends/cleaner.htm
It might serve as a clarifier, or perhaps confound the matter further. Decide for yourselves.
Today hasn’t been a good day for me…until now! *LOL* I don’t care if that is true or not, it is just (in my mind) hilarious and although this sounds sick, I’ve laughed my socks off at it! *huge hug*
Thank-you for lightening up my day cos that really did give me a good laugh!
All the best for 2001 and the Festive Season,
ZaraD.
Posted on newspaper this year? I believe I received an email of this exact content 3 years ago…
Even if it wasn’t true… it certainly makes you think! Dang floor polishers!
Oh my..that is a sad story. If I wasn’t real I would laugh. I would love to slap that cleaning woman but at the same time I feel really bad for her. Although I feel awful for the deceased and their family, that cleaning women now has to deal with the fact that she is responsible for deaths. It is not only her fault though, someone should have explained to her what is what.
I just read the other comments. Hopefully, this isn’t true…but I still dont’ find much humour in it.
I have read this before, I think a friend sent it to me. An interesting tale, don’t you think?
A similar thing happened to me once – I was installing a computer network and had just got the whole thing online when everything suddenly went dead! No phones, no network, no mainframe, nothing… Realizing that everything was powered by a cental Comms cabinet in an upstairs office I raced up only to find that the cleaner had remove the power to the cabinet in order to plug in a vacuum cleaner! I can laugh about it now, but at the time I was pretty pissed – Especially when you consider that it was a double socket and the other outlet could have been used!!!