Why nobody wrote the colonel

I saw something on TV that made me sheepishly realize I've been expecting far too much in expecting others to answer my e-mails.

You know, I've heard stories about people routinely abandoning people like me who've been laid off and can't land new work. People like me make people like them uncomfortable. On the other hand, I'm old-fashioned enough to find not answering e-mails despicably discourteous; as rude as blowing off a friendly hello in the hall.

But what do I know?

Not much, evidently, according to what I saw on ABC's What Would You Do? last week. The show's producers conducted a hidden-camera test in broad daylight in New Jersey. They had an actor disguised as a homeless man collapse and lie motionless on a busy city sidewalk, to see how long he'd have to lie there before someone at least whipped out a cell phone.

Sure, the empty beer can in the actor's hand might explain why 88 people walked right by as though a fallen man wasn't there. But how about this: The 89th person, a limping African-American woman who later told What Would You Do? she'd been homeless herself on occasion, not only stopped to check on the apparently unconscious man, but stood there begging passersby to please call 9-1-1. She even removed the built-in beer-can turn-off. A total of 26 people ignored her pleas before another compassionate woman deigned to make the call.

What the heck.

But there's more. As a preamble to the foregoing, the show aired surveillance-camera footage of a real-life incident in which a woman fell to the floor and lay motionless for 45 minutes in the waiting room of a New York hospital, ignored not only by everyone else in that waiting room but even by several members of the hospital staff who looked at her and kept going. She died where she lay, mis amigos. Dead right there.

I'm not trying to blow my own horn when I say I know for certain I would have helped both those people lying motionless on the ground; it would not have occurred to me not to.

And on that basis I reckon the fault lies with me for believing others should answer my e-mails.

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