At random

A friend passed along to me a news story that I at first found hilarious -- but then also a bit sobering. "Worker dead at desk for five days," the startling headline reads. The story goes on to explain that George Turkelbaum, a 51-year-old proofreader at a New York publishing house, came to the office on Monday morning, sat down at his desk in the "open-plan office he shared with 23 other workers," and only on the following Saturday did one of the office cleaners ask him why he was working on the weekend. Presumably, he/she thought there was something a tad odd about a worker who had been sitting in one spot for five days. Of course, proofreading -- checking a revised print copy against an earlier one -- is a profoundly silent occupation, but five days?

For any of you who know it, I refer you to Herman Melville's brilliant short story, "Bartleby the Scrivener," a scrivener being a 19th-century proofreader of sorts.

In Bartleby's case, he ended his eventless and meaningless life by refusing to help his fellow-workers by helping them check their work, and, later, staring at the concrete walls at the Tombs, New York City's ancient penitentiary.

The newspaper story about Mr. Turkelbaum explains that he died of a coronary, but I wonder. The newspaper story tells us that he "was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died."

Well, go ahead, put yourself in George's place, I'll bet the poor guy died of terminal boredom. Yawn, ker-plunk! I, too, have worked in an open-plan office I shared with 20 other workers at a New York City publishing firm, and part of my job was to proofread copy for a magazine on railroads we published four times a year. The proofreading part was deadly dull; my only salvation was in knowing I would be there only three years, before enrolling in graduate courses at the University of Minnesota.

Something else that saved me was that nearly all the other workers were kids my own age or younger. They were a fun-loving and boisterous bunch who were not yet driven to despair by the grinding sameness of the work we all had to do. Often, we'd go out to lunch together. Lenny Macaluso, my particularly close friend, used to go out on the fire escape and, accompanied by the roar of the trains entering or emerging from the Pennsylvania Station far below, sing a medley of Frank Sinatra tunes. Every once in a while, he'd want to spend the lunch hour standing at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street checking out the girls who were either coming from or going to lunch. Fat chance Lenny'd have left me rotting at my desk for five days. You've got to feel sorry for George Turkelbaum. He was 51 when he died, and he'd worked as a proofreader at the same firm doing exactly the same thing for 30 years. My God!

That means he'd no sooner left childhood than he entered this numbing job for three decades checking for accuracy in printed proof against the original copy. Elliot Wachliaski, his boss, was interviewed at the scene, and commented, "George was always the first in each morning and the last to leave at night, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything. He was always absorbed in his work and kept much to himself.'

Come on!! There was nothing "usual" about George's death. And it seems there was nothing natural about the office he worked in. What a dead office! Wasn't there anyone who took his proofreading assignments to the poor guy? Wasn't there someone to check his proofreading for accuracy?

I knew a silent loner at my job in New York City; his name was Warren Schack. He was about 5 feet 9 inches, with a crew cut and dark suit and pale complexion and a chronic smoker's hacking cough. He sat at his desk with an upper left-hand drawer filled with packs of Winston cigarettes, and smoked while he proofread. He was quiet, he concentrated on his work, he lived by himself in a Queens apartment house, but he never let five days go by without speaking to someone, even if it was only a hurried greeting: "Hi, Chuck!" or "Will you please stop that damned singing, Lenny?"

At the end of the newspaper account of George Turkelbaum's silent death appears the moral: "Don't work too hard. Nobody notices anyway." I'd take that a bit farther. I'd say the moral of this story is "Work hard. But every hour on the hour shout out so everyone on the floor can hear, 'Hey fellows, I'm alive and breathing and working over here!'" Either that, or "At a job where there's so little interaction with other workers that you can disappear for five days without anyone's being the wiser, clear out of that job pronto!"

With the advent of computers in the 1980's, the need for a publication like the one I worked at for three years evaporated. The last time I was in New York City, in fact, I looked for it in the Manhattan telephone directory.

Gone.

I often wonder what became of the kids who had worked there. Where is Lenny Macaluso now? Where is Bill Trezise, the fellow who played the harp, but had "Death Before Dishonor" tattooed on his tanned left arm? And what about Rob Schneider, whose aunt, he said, had created the Barbie doll? I can't help feeling that, whatever they're doing now, it's a more humane and enlivening activity than George Turkelbaum's.

George Turkelbaum: R I P