Not that the US of A doesn't have it's own share of cray. We've got plenty, and a lot of it seems to be of the 'shoot-'em-up' and/or conspiracy theory variety.
As in the Trumpian white geezers in Florida, owners of a two-bit strip mall, who did some shooting when two Black fellows (and the 10 year old son of one of them) were returning a U-Haul van. Seems that the wife of this glorious couple thought she heard these guys siphoning gas, which apparently warranted the death penalty - or at least a couple of warning shots.
As in one of the latest theories old Trumpy's been floating: thugs on planes, dressed in black, flying into cities to cause chaos. Or take over the suburbs. (It's surprising that Trump didn't have Senator Cory Booker in there as leader of the traveling thug pack, since he's thrown Booker's name out there as someone who, under Biden, would be out there terrorizing the good white folks in suburbia.)
But. I. Digress.
The latest crazy story on the international front was about how the employees of one Carrefour grocery store in Brazil handled the at-work death of a colleague.
When sales manager Manoel Cavalcante had a heart attack during his morning shift, his colleagues' immediate response to this variant on a theme of "shop 'til you drop" was just fine. They administered CPR and called an ambulance. They were unable to revive him. The paramedics weren't able to do so either, and they left the body there - with instructions to the employees not to move it. Presumably, until the coroner or the funeral parlor could get there to take possession.
But there was nothing in the company manual that told employees what to do next. So the employees improvised. They:
...surrounded Cavalcanate's body with boxes and umbrellas to hide it from view, and kept the store open. (Source: percolately)
Talk about pickup on aisle six.
Carrefour has apologized for this lapse of judgement, and updated their guidelines to cover this sort of situation,
The story has - and why not? - gone viral, with lots of gab about the perils of capitalism, etc. But maybe it is really just a story about a bunch of grocery store workers, stuck in an unusual and weird situation, who just did the best they could without thinking things through.
Obviously, they were responding to the authorities who told them not to move the body. Maybe they should have ignored that and taken the body to a back room and covered it with shopping bags or something. But they didn't. They did what they were told by people (EMT's) who one would suppose knew what you were supposed to do in a sudden death situation.
When I was in grammar school, most kids went home for lunch, and we walked home in patrol lines. Well, one day, when I was in third grade, the process got a bit screwed up and the third grade cohort of the "Gates Lane Plain"* patrol line ended up behind the second grade cohort. Which, as everyone knows, was unacceptable and something that just could not stand.
But while we were doing a bit of murmured balking about this total travesty and getting geared up to move en masse to secure our rightful position in front of the second graders, a nun swung by and hissed at us, "Stay where you are."
So, good little parochial dweebs that we were, we did. And didn't move one inch even when the rest of the patrol line marched off. And there we stood for a good long - there must have been 10 or 12 of us (here's who I recall would have been in the group of third graders who were part of "Gates Lane Plain": me, Susan, Kathy, Rosemary, Carol, Mary Agnes, Jimmy, Billy, Andy, Mike, Kevin) - until another nun swung by and started screaming at us to hurry on home. (I think she called us "fools.") We couldn't have stood there, frozen, for that long, because no one's mother called the school to see where her 8-year old was. And, in looking through that list, everyone of those kids, with the exception of Kevin, who was an only child, had at least one sibling in that patrol line. I would think that if we'd been missing for too long, one of them might have noticed...
So I'm pretty sure that, as a third grader at least, I would have left the damned body in Carrefour where it was, just like the EMT told me.
But as an adult?
Who knows? Maybe most of the other employees were young kids, in their teens. Or minimum wage workers who figured that the bosses would have wanted the shopping show to go on. (I think that man that died might have been the person in charge.) So maybe they all just didn't know what to do with a dead body, other than cover it up. (At least there's that.)
Anyway, a crazy little story, and I'm just as happy that it didn't take place in the US for a change. We've already got too many "Florida Man" stories of our own.
So here's my final thought: wonder if they put those umbrellas on sale afterwards
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*Patrol lines were assembled by which direction they were heading in. "Gates Lane Plain" passed by Gates Lane School, and contained all the kids who lived on streets off of one side of Main Street. "Gates Lane that Crosses" headed in the same direction, but they crossed Main Street.
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