● For most people, the office is a place of boring routine, where nothing interesting
ever happens.
But what hidden dangers lie in the stationery cupboard?
What happens when your coworkers go off the rails?
Here are the unusual ways people have died in an office.
15 - Stabbed by ink eraser ● George Millet was an office boy working
for an insurance company in New York in 1909.
On his fifteenth birthday, the office typists decided to give handsome George a present
- the girls would kiss him fifteen times.
As the nervous teenager was smothered in smooches, an old-fashioned, bladed ink-eraser in his
top pocket pressed into his chest and stabbed him through the heart, killing him a few hours
later.
At least he had some good memories though.
14 - Proving a point ● Ex-politician and lawyer Clement Vallandigham
was responsible for proving the innocence of a man accused of murder in a barroom brawl
in 1871.
At a courthouse in Ohio, Clement had figured out, through his own experiments, that the
victim must have handled his own gun in a way that caused him to shoot himself.
In an attempt to prove suicide, rather than murder, Clement staged the event himself,
accidentally shooting a hole in his stomach in the process.
13 - Karoshi ● The heavy pressure to work harder, longer
and faster takes its toll on the Japanese workforce.
The high suicide rate is a result of this drive for productivity, but it’s not just
people taking their lives.
Miwa Sado was a thirty-one year old journalist at the NHK broadcasting corporation who died
of heart failure.
This was after working nearly 160 hours of overtime in one month, taking only two days
off.
Death by overwork is known as karoshi in Japan.
12 - Strangled in the shower ● After being fired from his job at a London
marketing firm, Matthew Fagan was bankrupt and desperate for money.
One Saturday morning he broke back into his ex-company offices to steal computers, but
he was caught by an old colleague, Cathy Marlow, who had come into the building to catch up
on some work.
Fagan immediately struck her with a hammer and strangled her to death with a scarf, leaving
her body in the office shower room.
11 - Office on the go ● These days, the development of technology
and the availability of the internet means more and more people are taking the office
with them as the travel.
Not wanting to waste productivity while driving, 29-year old computer expert Oscar Hinojosa
had his laptop in front of him while going down highway 99 near Sacramento.
We know this, because that’s how his body was found, with the laptop still running,
when police investigated the wreckage of his car.
10 - Drunk to death ● One Saturday morning, an Australian computer
technician was helped back to his office to sleep off a rather heavy night.
Allan had taken part in a hotel bar drinking competition where competitors had 100 minutes
to score as many points a possible, with one point for beer and eight points for hard booze.
Allan scored 236 points, and unsurprisingly never woke up from his chair.
9 - Death by shredder ● At a UK plastics company in a business
park, a thirty-one year old worker suffered the kind of death that usually happens in
James Bond movies.
He was pulled into a large paper shredder and hide body mangled to the extent that ten
days after the accident, police were still trying to identify the victim.
While the machine was larger than your average office shredder, it’s certainly an argument
for not having to wear a tie to work.
8 - Poisoned in the lab ● Professor of Chemistry Karen Wetterhahn
was working in her office laboratory with a chemical called dimethylmercury.
When she accidentally spilled no more than two two drops of the substance onto her gloved
hand, she took the necessary precautions of cleaning the area and then removing the clothing.
But this wasn’t enough, as the incredible toxicity of this tiny amount of chemical led
to her neurological decline and eventual death a year later.
7 - Texas Suicide ● A disgruntled employee returned to his
former workplace, a trucking company, armed with a shotgun and a handgun, shouting “Y’all
ruined my life”.
This happened, as you can probably guess, in Texas.
The man killed one of his former coworkers, injured two others before turning the gun
on himself.
The man had been fired a few days beforehand and evidently hadn’t quite cooled off yet.
6 - Christmas Party Killing ● In another heartwarming tale of furious,
gun-toting office workers, a man in Vancouver did the same after losing his job at a health
food supply company.
But Allen Kirkpatrick chose the workplace christmas party on a Friday afternoon as his
time to burst in and open fire, killing his ex-boss.
The police managed to arrest the man later on, and he was charged with first degree murder.
5 - Died Unnoticed ● A tax auditor in Finland was working at
his desk died quietly on a Tuesday morning.
The unusual and depressing part to the story is that no one even noticed he was dead until
the Thursday.
His colleagues knew him to be a busy and sometimes solitary man, so no one disturbed him until
a friend called to have lunch, and his body was found in his office.
4 - Going postal ● Many of these stories involve disgruntled
office workers going postal on their former employees, but the 1986 post office shooting
in Edmond, Oklahoma is what gave us the phrase ‘going postal’.
Angry at being reprimanded the day before, a mail carrier stormed into the office with
three pistols and killed fourteen of the people working there, and injured a further six.
The killer, who took his own life, was an ex-marine and a member of a pistol shooting
team.
3 - Struck by lightning ● In 1969 Steve Marshburn was working inside
a bank at a teller's window.
As a storm raged outside, lightning struck the teller's intercom system, sending a surge
of current down Marshburn's back.
The electricity caused serious damage to his spine and brain, exiting his hand via a metal
stamp that he had been holding.
Marshburn himself later set up a Lightning and Electric Shock Survivors group, which
now has 1,800 members globally.
2 - Licking Envelopes ● The office has some pretty dangerous equipment
lying around like staplers, scissors and shredders.
But it was a paper envelope that lead to the death of manufacturing tycoon Sigmund Fechheimer
in 1895.
After finishing a letter to his wife, Sigmund licked the gum strip on the back to seal the
envelope and managed to cut his tongue.
The next day his tongue had swollen up and the blood poisoning from infection killed
him shortly after.
1 - Ran through a window ● In 1993, a group of visiting law students
were being shown round the firm headquarters in downtown Toronto by company partner Garry
Hoy.
As he had done countless times before, Garry proudly demonstrated the strength of the unbreakable
office windows by running and slamming his body into the pane of glass.
The glass didn’t break, but it did come out of its frame, causing Garry to plummet
24 floors, while the students watched, perhaps rethinking their possible internship.