A Kick in the Career: Amazing True Stories of Death by Overtime

Some guy in Japan just bought the farm by working too hard. You heard right. He was 45, the lead engineer for a Toyota hybrid car division. While he was helping us reduce our dependence on oil, the poor guy ran out of gas. And he didn't even live as long as some of our aging rock stars. You know the economy's in bad shape when an auto worker doesn't last as long as Keith Richards. Prior to his death this dedicated worker had been averaging over 80 hours of overtime per month. Which I guess should now be referred to as " six feet undertime."

The amazing thing is that his dying from too much work was not just an opinion, but an official ruling handed down by the Japanese Labor Bureau Aichi. And recently, they've ruled similarly in other cases. Apparently, working insanely punishing hours to the point of kicking the bucket is becoming quite popular in Japan. I wonder if guys in Tokyo are placing bets over a beer. First guy: "I'll be dead by the weekend." Second guy: "Oh, yeah? I'll bet you two hundred yen I won't see tomorrow." First guy: "Hey, that's not fair! You've got the graveyard shift!" The worst part is, if you die first and win the bet, how do you collect? The problem has become so widespread that the Japanese even have a word, "karoshi," which means "death from overwork." Not to be confused with "karaoke," which means "death by plunging a cocktail umbrella into your carotid artery after listening to your best friend sing 'My Way' off-key for nine straight hours."

If this story, which happens to be from the Far East, does not resonate with you here in the West, then either you need to start working harder or maybe you're already dead. News flash: we work too hard in this country, too. We have long been in denial about our capacity for pounding the keyboards of our Blackberries until the letters and numbers are worn off. We know it's time to get a new one when our text messages asking a friend to meet us at Starbucks are so unintelligible they look like a hieroglyphic missive sent from Cairo to Rome by carrier snake. And corporations are already aggravated enough shelling out for maternity leave and on-site day care, imagine how furious they'll be when they have to start paying death benefits to the families of deceased workaholics. I don't think an angry widow will be happy with the "My Husband Bought It At His Job And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" consolation prize.

All the more reason to kill the very concept of death from overwork in its tracks before it can make it into Western society.

Corporations can start including the virtues of death in their mission statement.

Our goal is to combine superlative customer service with extraordinarily high product quality and at least nine employee deaths per quarter. We stand behind our company motto: "Here Today -- With A 2.8 Percent Chance of Not Making It Till Tomorrow."

Shareholder meetings will provide another opportunity to get people used to new corporate language:

"Ladies and gentlemen, in order to help launch our new product line on time and under-budget, over 300 people died horrible, stress-related deaths. 299 of them did so willingly; and that's just the kind of commitment we make here at Bed, Bath & The Great Beyond. Oh, and please go out the back way: the families of the people who croaked are in the lobby, menacing our receptionist with crudely-made street weaponry."

Soon, just to survive, employees will create the illusion of overworking. They'll stack their desks with paperwork, stay after hours and wear the same clothing for days, stinking up the office with their apparent dedication through lack of personal hygiene, all in the hopes of being recognized simply for their willingness to die on the job. People will pretend to have very urgent phone conversations in hushed tones when their bosses walk by, to give the impression that the company is their number one priority. "Sweetheart, I know our wedding is in fifteen minutes, and I appreciate that you've invited over 700 people and that your parents, who are paying for all this, have flown in from the Ukraine and have endured being held for over seven hours at the airport and cavity-searched by Homeland Security, but I promised our office manager I 'd go to Office Depot and pick up some toner and a 36 by 40 inch polyurethane mat for his swivel chair, so it doesn't encounter carpet resistance when he pushes it under his desk."

We can blame the corporations all we want, and certainly they need to take responsibility for how they wrap the bottom line around our necks. But so many of us overwork to avoid personal lives that we have allowed to become unmanageable. I'm fairly confident that work will never kill me, because I make sure to spend a lot of time around a wife who's always there for me, and two kids who love me no matter what. So you see, I know I won't get caught up in a horrible cycle of work obsession to the point of risking my life. And why? Because my entire family has been trained on, and are more than capable of using, my high-tech, state-of-the-art portable defibrillator. I'm ready for the day when my family is gathered around me at the breakfast table and my wife is rubbing two stainless steel paddles together screaming, " CLEAR!" and I'm thinking, " As soon as I'm done with this heart attack, I've got to get back to work." Norman Rockwell would be proud.

Comments

[Guitarsandmore]

Run for your life!

Escape before its too late!

I got out three years ago and have never looked back!

Take your guitar into the back yard sit in the shade and strum old James Taylor songs, you'll be much happier and healthier!

[OkieIntellectual]

Happier and healthier... until the bills start stacking up, the utilities are turned off, and you lose your house, vehicles, credit rating, etc. Then you'll have to strum your James Taylor tunes under the highway overpass with all the other homeless folks. In the (paraphrased) immortal words of Mr. Lebowski to The Dude, "The revolution is OVER, your side lost. Get a job you BUM!"

[NorCalNative]

Funny stuff Thomas. One must wonder if American workers on their deathbeds are gasping in their death throes "I wish I would have spent more time working!"

[CAPTAINSKIPPY]

At least in Japan they are willing to recognize the effects of an excessive/obsessive "work ethic". Here we still admire a devotion to getting the job done, at all costs (without overtime pay if possible, except for the executives claiming to work around the clock without overtime pay). Example: One of our departments lost an entire group of 5 experienced people, managers and workers, retiring within weeks of each other; the department was planning to hire one person as replacement, due to "budget concerns". I saw the same story almost 20 years ago with a former employer trying to secure bonuses for management by laying off the production workers; that firm was recently bought out for pennies on the dollar by a former subsidiary. Toxic capitalism, at its finest.

[blastocyst]

Routine overindulgence within that society. An ancient society nearly as inscrutable as China's.

Here, completely scrutable are we.

[Chavez08]

In Japan, (often young) workers have been dying of Kiroshi (overwork) since the 80s. Japan has alway been the test-bed for U.S. post-Reagan Capitalism.

This system works out great for Corporate henchmen, - it works out great for executive management because they can squeeze more and more productivity out of the workers, hoping they'll die before they have to start paying out on the benefits.

My friend's wife works for a big computer company in Detroit and the owner (CEO or ?) fires and threatens people often for no reason, mainly frustration, I often hear that my friends wife and her coworkers are making themselves sick worrying about losing their jobs if the wind shifts.

This same CEO opened a big cancer center, ironically. It must have been just for profit or a tax write off.

[BeeOplentee]

Although it's heresy these days, some of us remember--and observe-- the 40-hour work week.
(I said WEEK not DAY.)

[BlueBerryPickN]

Remember the American dude who did so much overtime he stuck his neck into the circular saw after he had **another** supervisor's meeting where mgt told him he had to FIRE MORE of his staff & find a way to do their jobs with fewer workers?

yeah... that's American DEMOCRACY!

gimme more of that... ummm... yummy.

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BlueBerry Pick'n
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