Leading cause of death: idiots

With thanks to Petar for sending this gem.

Idiots in the office are just as hazardous to your health as cigarettes, caffeine or greasy foods, an eye-opening new study reveals. In fact, those dopes can killyou! Stress is one of the top causes of heart attacks - and working with stupid people on a daily basis is one of the deadliest forms of stress, according to researchers at the Medical Centre of Sweden's Lindbergh University.

The author of the study, Dr Dagmar Andersson, says her team studied 500 heart attack patients and were puzzled to find 62 percent had relatively few of the physical risk factors commonly associated with heart attacks. "Then we questioned them about lifestyle habits and almost all of those low risk patients told us they worked with people so stupid they can barely find their way from the carpark to the office. And their heart attack came less than 12 hours after having a major confrontation with one of these oafs. One woman had to be rushed to hospital after her assistant shredded important company tax documents instead of copying them. A man told us he collapsed right at his desk because the woman at the next cubicle kept asking him for correction fluid - for her computer monitor."
Dr Andersson says: "You can cut back on smoking or improve your diet but most people have very poor coping skills when it comes to stupidity - they feel there's nothing they can do about it, so they just internalise their frustration until they finally explode."

Stupid co-workers can also double or triple someone's workload, she explains. "Many of our subjects feel sorry for the drooling idiots they work with, so they try to cover for them by fixing their mistakes. One poor woman spent a week rebuilding client records, because a clerk put them all in the computer's Recycle Bin and then emptied it - she thought it meant the records would be recycled and used again."