Fun_People Archive
3 Aug
ULOTD (Urban Legend O' The Day?) - Unlucky Bed

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sat,  3 Aug 96 17:36:39 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: ULOTD (Urban Legend O' The Day?) - Unlucky Bed

Forwarded-by: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Forwarded-by: Eric Hendrickson <edh@lenti.med.umn.edu>
Forwarded-by: "Mehta, Prayati (MN10)" <Prayati.Mehta@HBC.honeywell.com>

For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead patient in
the same bed every Friday morning" a spokeswoman for the Pelonomi Hospital
(Free State, South Africa) 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.

However, further inquiries have now revealed the cause of these deaths.
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.
Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is arranging for an
electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be no repetition of
this incident. The enquiry is now closed.

from (Cape Times, 6/13/96)

BTW, the headline of the newspaper story was, "Cleaner Polishes Off
Patients."

© 1996 Peter Langston