Tuesday, October 16, 2007

It's not brain surgery

Wow. We just came to the realization that yesterday we missed out on participating in "Blog Action Day". Apparently, blogs all across the Internet devoted themselves to talking about environmental issues. Given what we do, we could have tied ourselves in by mocking the Nobel Peace Prize given to Al Gore, but, really, the Nobel committee already mocked themselves enough by handing the award over to the grandfather of the Internet. So our work was done before we got there.

Today's story, oddly enough, actually does carry a bit of an impact on the environment, or at least it did for a local setting in Vienna. After all, a body forgotten for 9 days by the doctor who registered the death caused a bit of air pollution to disturb the neighbors. That's right. The doctor forgot to call a crew to remove the corpse, assuming that the paramedics would handle it. For their part, the paramedics thought that someone with a medical degree and a fancy stethoscope would remember to call a simple clean-up crew.

Of course, we shouldn't be so quick to judge. After all, we can only imagine that the doctor in question had already had a long day of forgetting things. We expect that he forgot to drop his son off at the bus stop, forgot to remove his keys from his ignition, spaced out a bit when he was supposed to be taking a clamp out of a patient, and totally blanked on removing that bad kidney. By the time he got to the body, his brain was so full of things he'd forgotten to do, that he just couldn't manage to cram any sort of memory inside of there, and instead thought that maybe the neighbors would like to buy extra air fresheners.

Naturally, the doctor has yet to forget a golf game, which patients have yet to be billed, and the lyrics to "Achy Breaky Heart". That darn song just never goes away.

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