emmanation

There are a lot of hard jobs out there.

Like, being a preschool teacher. Either parents are going to be all ‘hey take good care of my precious precious baby and don’t forget wood toys only and DEAR GOD keep those peanuts away from him!’ or they’re going to drop him off at the front door holding a Pepsi and a bag of airplane peanuts and screech away in their TransAm.

What? I’m not a parent – everything I know I learned from movies.

Also, I apparently think that bad parents drive muscle cars.

Other hard jobs? Working on an oil rig. Crockett and I just found out that someone we know was having a hard time finding a job, and has been working the night shift on an oil rig for the last six months. Apparently he’s lost 35 pounds and is slowly losing his mind. (Don’t worry – he’s got a line on a stockbroker position.)

It’s probably hard being a medical examiner, too. You have to help people identify their loved ones. You have to solve crimes while your pesky cop coworkers are breathing down your neck. You have to stick your hands in dead bodies, like, as a daily thing.

I would think, though, that establishing whether someone was dead or not would become sort of a normal part of your day.

‘Hey, Medical Examiner, we found this dude in bed this morning and he looks pretty dead. Can you check?’

Recently in South Africa, apparently the ME wasn’t feeling inclined to make that check.

Instead, he just took the word of the guy who went to pick up the body. Who, apparently, just took the word of the body’s family.

Seriously. A man’s family found him. He looked dead. They called the undertaker, who came and said ‘yep, sure looks dead to us’. They called the morgue people, who came and stuck the man in a car and drove him to the morgue.

The morgue owner (who I am assuming is the South African equivalent of a medical examiner) stuck him in a fridge.

Without noticing that he was just in a coma.

Sure, the family missed the coma – I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to get all vital signy on dead grandpa’s ass. And the undertaker? Kind of a stretch, but it’s not like they started replacing his blood with formaldehyde.  However, I would expect someone who’s job it is to examine dead bodies to notice when a body wasn’t actually dead.

Of course, everyone who worked at the morgue noticed 21 hours later when the -ahem- ‘dead guy’ woke up from his coma and yelled for someone to let him out of the fridge.

Again – being a person who deals with dead bodies? Probably a tough job. Right up there with preschool teacher and oil rig worker, even.

Making sure that the bodies you’re dealing with are actually dead?

Seems kind of basic to me.

P.S. The actual best part of the story is that the morgue owner called the police and told them that he had a ghost. And asked them if they’d shoot it. The guy doesn’t understand how dead bodies or ghosts work.