Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Good help is always hard to find. Proper
Speaker 1: training can do a lot to ensure a job well done,
Speaker 1: but those training materials need to be tested and proven.
Speaker 1: They must be written by people with experience who have
Speaker 1: gone through and vetted the methods being taught. For example,
Speaker 1: if a decision needs to be made, it should go
Speaker 1: through as many channels as possible. Time is not of
Speaker 1: the essence. Bureaucracy is always best. Another way to increase
Speaker 1: productivity and maximize efficiency is to clog up meetings with
Speaker 1: issues that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Speaker 1: If something was resolved at a previous meeting, bring it
Speaker 1: up again and ask whether it was the right decision
Speaker 1: more than once. When in doubt's play, it's safe, every
Speaker 1: task should take as long as possible. You know the
Speaker 1: old saying measured twice, cut once, but only after you've
Speaker 1: measured another eight times. Managers can also get on board
Speaker 1: by having their most efficient employees focus on the most
Speaker 1: unimportant tasks. When those tasks are completed, the employees can
Speaker 1: then go back to fix even the smallest flaws. Every
Speaker 1: meaningless job should be completed to utter perfection. Meanwhile, employees
Speaker 1: known for being slow and lazy should be given the
Speaker 1: complex jobs that require careful attention. Upon completion. Incorrectly, of course,
Speaker 1: those employees should be praised and promoted in full view
Speaker 1: of everyone else. This will shatter morale and in turn
Speaker 1: increase productivity among the group. Oh and those meetings we
Speaker 1: talked about should happen often and with no agendas. Let
Speaker 1: attendees wonder why they're they're in the first place, and
Speaker 1: what the point of each meeting might actually be. Now,
Speaker 1: if all of this sounds like the opposite of what
Speaker 1: we've learned in order to succeed at our jobs, that's
Speaker 1: because it is. These instructions were part of a deliberate
Speaker 1: plan by the United States to sabotage foreign governments from within,
Speaker 1: developed by the Office of Strategic Services, the organization that
Speaker 1: would eventually become the CIA. The simple sabotage field Manual
Speaker 1: was a training guide developed during World War Two. Its
Speaker 1: goal was to help citizens and government workers who were
Speaker 1: sympathetic to the Allies but stuck inside access help countries.
Speaker 1: It's techniques extended beyond white color jobs as well. Factory
Speaker 1: workers could deliberately gum up the works by accidentally shorting
Speaker 1: out wires or contaminating a vat of molten rubber by
Speaker 1: spilling unnecessary ingredients into it, which would render it unusable.
Speaker 1: Surfaces that needed to be smooth could be sanded instead.
Speaker 1: Tools could be forgotten or lost so that certain jobs
Speaker 1: couldn't even be done at all. It wasn't about outright
Speaker 1: hostility toward the enemy. Instead, it was death by a
Speaker 1: thousand cuts, or in this case, death by a thousand
Speaker 1: silly avoidable mistakes, and regular citizens could get in on
Speaker 1: the fund too. Chewing gum and hairpins made excellent tools
Speaker 1: for jamming locks, heck, one of the more ingenious methods
Speaker 1: of civil disobedience involved a bag of moths. A person
Speaker 1: would walk into a movie theater showing propaganda films with
Speaker 1: a bag of moths tucked in their coat. Once seated,
Speaker 1: they would set the bag down and open it up,
Speaker 1: releasing the moths into the theater. The flying insects would
Speaker 1: then flutter up to the light of the projector and
Speaker 1: obscure the film so no one else could watch the movie.
Speaker 1: There were also instructions on how to keep average citizens
Speaker 1: motivated while performing simple acts of abotage by assuring them
Speaker 1: that they were part of a larger movement or promising
Speaker 1: a future where an unwanted leader might be moved due
Speaker 1: to their inactions. The OSS was able to get help
Speaker 1: from folks behind enemy lines. The manual was declassified in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight and is freely available on the
Speaker 1: CIA's website, although most workers probably won't need it, with
Speaker 1: a countless meetings and never ending bureaucracy clogging up our
Speaker 1: own workdays, today, the modern workspace is well suited to
Speaker 1: crippling productivity, destroying employee morale, and bringing government agencies to
Speaker 1: a halt. You know what they say, if you want
Speaker 1: to do something right, going to have to do it
Speaker 1: yourself badly. When we experienced the unthinkable, it's easy to
Speaker 1: lose hope. The human body can only handle so much.
Speaker 1: Exposing ourselves to the extremes for too long can shorten
Speaker 1: our chances of survival. Anna was a stranger to extremes.
Speaker 1: Born in Sweden in nineteen seventy, Anna's focus was on
Speaker 1: helping others while studying in Norway to become an orthopedic surgeon.
Speaker 1: Her mentor invited her to his retirement party. He was
Speaker 1: set to close one chapter of his life in May
Speaker 1: of nineteen. But before arriving at the party, Anna had
Speaker 1: just one more stop to make. She and two colleagues
Speaker 1: headed for the mountains just outside of town for a
Speaker 1: quick ski trip. Anna was no stranger to the slopes.
Speaker 1: Those outings were common after work, and she had been
Speaker 1: down one particular mountain side numerous times. But on May nine,
Speaker 1: she made a fateful mistake. Anna slipped and lost her
Speaker 1: footing tumbling down the mountain side, she skidded across a
Speaker 1: frozen stream before being partially swallowed by a hole in
Speaker 1: the ice. Trapped among the rocks in the water with
Speaker 1: no way to get out, she was eventually found twenty
Speaker 1: minutes later by her friends. They rushed to her side
Speaker 1: and tried to pull her out, but she wouldn't budge.
Speaker 1: After ten minutes of struggling, one of them called the
Speaker 1: police for help. Anna clung to life, breathing with the
Speaker 1: help of an air pocket she had found while submerged.
Speaker 1: Her friends held on to her skis until the police
Speaker 1: and emergency workers could reach them. Well ten minutes turned
Speaker 1: into forty. Then the cold started to set in. Anna's
Speaker 1: heart slowed to a point where it couldn't pump enough
Speaker 1: blood to keep her awake. She went into circulatory arrest
Speaker 1: just as the medics had reached her. First, they tied
Speaker 1: a rope around her and pulled, but they couldn't move
Speaker 1: her without causing serious injury. Snow shovels weren't strong enough
Speaker 1: to cut through the ice around her either. A metal
Speaker 1: garden shovel finally did the trick, though, They hacked away
Speaker 1: at the surrounding ice and finally freed her after eighty
Speaker 1: minutes in the water. Her body temperature had dropped to
Speaker 1: almost fifty seven degrees fahrenheit, the blood in her veins
Speaker 1: had practically stopped flowing, and she wasn't breathing. Her colleagues
Speaker 1: tried to administer CPR on the a to the hospital,
Speaker 1: but it didn't work. A defibrillator couldn't even bring her back.
Speaker 1: Her skin had gone ice cold, and by all measures,
Speaker 1: she was technically dead. Doctors hooked her up to an
Speaker 1: e c G and it showed nothing but a flat line.
Speaker 1: Dr Gilbert, the e R chief attending to her case,
Speaker 1: immediately whisked her to an operating room. He wasn't ready
Speaker 1: to declare her dead just yet. Along with the team
Speaker 1: of dozens of doctors and nurses, Dr Gilbert worked for
Speaker 1: over nine hours to bring Anna back. His hope was
Speaker 1: that the extreme cold had slowed down her metabolism enough
Speaker 1: to keep her brain from experiencing any long term damage.
Speaker 1: You see, when the human body reaches such a low temperature,
Speaker 1: the brain requires a lot less oxygen to survive. That's,
Speaker 1: along with the CPR the medics had performed on her,
Speaker 1: should have been enough to keep her alive. The first
Speaker 1: thing Dr Gilbert did in the operating room was connect
Speaker 1: Anna to a heart lung machine. It pumped her cold
Speaker 1: blood out of her body and warmed it externally before
Speaker 1: circulating it back in. It took hours, but it worked.
Speaker 1: Her body temperature began to rise. She stayed on life
Speaker 1: support for another twenty four hours. The following day, her
Speaker 1: heart started to pump on its own again. It took
Speaker 1: another agonizing month on a ventilator before her body regained functionality,
Speaker 1: and when she woke up and couldn't move anything below
Speaker 1: her neck, she panicked, but the paralysis was only temporary,
Speaker 1: nothing more than a side effect of the accident. Anna
Speaker 1: begging Home wasn't the first person to be frozen alive,
Speaker 1: but she was the first to have survived. She fully
Speaker 1: recovered with no detectable brain damage. Her case not only
Speaker 1: broke records, but it helped doctors better understand the effects
Speaker 1: of hypothermia on the human body. Thankfully, Anna received the
Speaker 1: finest medical care that Norway had to offer, so when
Speaker 1: she got back on her feet four months later, she
Speaker 1: couldn't help but pay it forward. She took a job
Speaker 1: as a radiologist at the very same hospital that had
Speaker 1: saved her life, and apparently she received a warm welcome.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
Speaker 1: and you can learn all about it over at the
Speaker 1: World of lore dot com, and until next time, stay curious. Yeah,