The World is a Very Odd Place

The world is a very odd place isn’t it? The older I get the more bewilderingly odd it seems to become.

The other day an old friend of mine told me that her son had called her, asking her to go into the Gents Toilet at their local Starbucks to pick up the secret monitoring equipment he had left in a cubicle. He is paid to go into branches and to buy coffee and cakes for quality control purposes. He takes them into the toilet and weighs the cakes with a scale and tests the temperature of the coffee with a thermometer. This time he’d left the scales and thermometer in the cubicle and was trying to reclaim them.

As if this isn’t odd enough look at the following!

The Associated Press reports that the FBI has started cracking down on a widespread insurance scam in which hospitals fill up their beds with homeless people posing as patients, and then charge government programs for the costs.

Hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties submitted phony Medicare and Medi-Cal bills for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homeless patients — including drug addicts and the mentally ill — recruited from downtown’s Skid Row, state and federal authorities allege.
While treating minor problems that did not require hospitalization, such as dehydration, exhaustion or yeast infections, the hospitals allegedly kept homeless patients in beds for as long as three days and charged the government for the stays.

Put that together with this report from Jan 2008 which described how hospitals frequently employ fake patients in order to spy on doctors and check out whether they’re doing what they should be. The problem is that sometimes the real patients in the emergency room are stuck in line behind the fake patients.

from www.museumofhoaxes.com

The next time you’re in a queue in a cafe or hospital remember the person in front might be a fake!