Bosses of a publishing firm are trying to find out why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for FIVE DAYS before anyone asked if he was feeling okay.

George Turklebaum, 51, who had been employed as a proofreader at a New York firm for 30 years, had a heart attack in the open-plan office he shared with 23 other workers. He quietly passed away on Monday, but nobody noticed until Saturday morning when an office cleaner asked why he was still working during the weekend.

His boss, Elliot Wachiaski, said: "George was always the first guy 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 pretty much to himself."

A post mortem examination revealed that he had been dead for five days after suffering a coronary. Ironically, George was proofreading manuscripts of medical textbooks when he died.

We all live and work around people who have died.

It's a disturbing article. How could anyone die and go unnoticed for five days??? However, like so many "unbelievable" stories that are circulated, this one is merely another "urban legend." It's not true (for further info on this story, you can visit this site: http://www.snopes2.com/horrors/gruesome/fivedays.htm).

The truth is, though, we all live and work around people who have died — and no one seems to have noticed. Like the boy in the movie, "The Sixth Sense," we can honestly say, "I see dead people." We can see people who have died in their trespasses and sins, people who have died to the things of God, and people who have died to a sense of doing what is good and right.

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. (Ephesians 2:1-3 NRS)

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Alan Smith ministers with the Church of Christ in White House, Tennessee and publishes the email devotional "Thought for the Day."

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