Ice Breaker

They must be written by people with experience who have gone through and vetted the methods being taught. For example, if a decision needs to be made, it should go through as many channels as possible. Time is not of the essence. Bureaucracy is always best. Another way to increase productivity and maximize efficiency is to clog up meetings with issues that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.

If something was resolved at a previous meeting, bring it up again and ask whether it was the right decision more than once. When in doubt's play, it's safe, every task should take as long as possible. You know the old saying measured twice, cut once, but only after you've measured another eight times. Managers can also get on board by having their most efficient employees focus on the most unimportant tasks. When those tasks are completed, the employees can

then go back to fix even the smallest flaws. Every meaningless job should be completed to utter perfection. Meanwhile, employees known for being slow and lazy should be given the complex jobs that require careful attention. Upon completion. Incorrectly, of course, those employees should be praised and promoted in full view of everyone else. This will shatter morale and in turn increase productivity among the group. Oh and those meetings we

talked about should happen often and with no agendas. Let attendees wonder why they're they're in the first place, and what the point of each meeting might actually be. Now, if all of this sounds like the opposite of what we've learned in order to succeed at our jobs, that's because it is. These instructions were part of a deliberate plan by the United States to sabotage foreign governments from within, developed by the Office of Strategic Services, the organization that

would eventually become the CIA. The simple sabotage field Manual was a training guide developed during World War Two. Its goal was to help citizens and government workers who were sympathetic to the Allies but stuck inside access help countries.

It's techniques extended beyond white color jobs as well. Factory workers could deliberately gum up the works by accidentally shorting out wires or contaminating a vat of molten rubber by spilling unnecessary ingredients into it, which would render it unusable. Surfaces that needed to be smooth could be sanded instead. Tools could be forgotten or lost so that certain jobs couldn't even be done at all. It wasn't about outright

hostility toward the enemy. Instead, it was death by a thousand cuts, or in this case, death by a thousand silly avoidable mistakes, and regular citizens could get in on the fund too. Chewing gum and hairpins made excellent tools for jamming locks, heck, one of the more ingenious methods of civil disobedience involved a bag of moths. A person would walk into a movie theater showing propaganda films with a bag of moths tucked in their coat. Once seated, they would set the bag down and open it up,

releasing the moths into the theater. The flying insects would then flutter up to the light of the projector and obscure the film so no one else could watch the movie. There were also instructions on how to keep average citizens motivated while performing simple acts of abotage by assuring them that they were part of a larger movement or promising a future where an unwanted leader might be moved due to their inactions. The OSS was able to get help

from folks behind enemy lines. The manual was declassified in two thousand and eight and is freely available on the CIA's website, although most workers probably won't need it, with a countless meetings and never ending bureaucracy clogging up our own workdays, today, the modern workspace is well suited to crippling productivity, destroying employee morale, and bringing government agencies to a halt. You know what they say, if you want to do something right, going to have to do it

yourself badly. When we experienced the unthinkable, it's easy to lose hope. The human body can only handle so much. Exposing ourselves to the extremes for too long can shorten our chances of survival. Anna was a stranger to extremes. Born in Sweden in nineteen seventy, Anna's focus was on helping others while studying in Norway to become an orthopedic surgeon. Her mentor invited her to his retirement party. He was set to close one chapter of his life in May

of nineteen. But before arriving at the party, Anna had just one more stop to make. She and two colleagues headed for the mountains just outside of town for a quick ski trip. Anna was no stranger to the slopes. Those outings were common after work, and she had been down one particular mountain side numerous times. But on May nine,

she made a fateful mistake. Anna slipped and lost her footing tumbling down the mountain side, she skidded across a frozen stream before being partially swallowed by a hole in the ice. Trapped among the rocks in the water with no way to get out, she was eventually found twenty minutes later by her friends. They rushed to her side and tried to pull her out, but she wouldn't budge. After ten minutes of struggling, one of them called the

police for help. Anna clung to life, breathing with the help of an air pocket she had found while submerged. Her friends held on to her skis until the police and emergency workers could reach them. Well ten minutes turned into forty. Then the cold started to set in. Anna's heart slowed to a point where it couldn't pump enough blood to keep her awake. She went into circulatory arrest just as the medics had reached her. First, they tied a rope around her and pulled, but they couldn't move

her without causing serious injury. Snow shovels weren't strong enough to cut through the ice around her either. A metal garden shovel finally did the trick, though, They hacked away at the surrounding ice and finally freed her after eighty minutes in the water. Her body temperature had dropped to almost fifty seven degrees fahrenheit, the blood in her veins had practically stopped flowing, and she wasn't breathing. Her colleagues tried to administer CPR on the a to the hospital,

but it didn't work. A defibrillator couldn't even bring her back. Her skin had gone ice cold, and by all measures, she was technically dead. Doctors hooked her up to an e c G and it showed nothing but a flat line. Dr Gilbert, the e R chief attending to her case, immediately whisked her to an operating room. He wasn't ready to declare her dead just yet. Along with the team of dozens of doctors and nurses, Dr Gilbert worked for

over nine hours to bring Anna back. His hope was that the extreme cold had slowed down her metabolism enough to keep her brain from experiencing any long term damage. You see, when the human body reaches such a low temperature, the brain requires a lot less oxygen to survive. That's, along with the CPR the medics had performed on her, should have been enough to keep her alive. The first thing Dr Gilbert did in the operating room was connect

Anna to a heart lung machine. It pumped her cold blood out of her body and warmed it externally before circulating it back in. It took hours, but it worked. Her body temperature began to rise. She stayed on life support for another twenty four hours. The following day, her

heart started to pump on its own again. It took another agonizing month on a ventilator before her body regained functionality, and when she woke up and couldn't move anything below her neck, she panicked, but the paralysis was only temporary, nothing more than a side effect of the accident. Anna begging Home wasn't the first person to be frozen alive, but she was the first to have survived. She fully

recovered with no detectable brain damage. Her case not only broke records, but it helped doctors better understand the effects of hypothermia on the human body. Thankfully, Anna received the finest medical care that Norway had to offer, so when she got back on her feet four months later, she couldn't help but pay it forward. She took a job as a radiologist at the very same hospital that had saved her life, and apparently she received a warm welcome.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of lore dot com, and until next time, stay curious. Yeah,