check in, check out

An airport worker who helped two women lift the body of a dead relative from a taxi, before they tried to check him in for a flight, said he knew he was dead. 

Gitta Jarant and Anke Anusic tried to check in the body of Curt Willi Jarant for a flight to Berlin at Liverpool John Lennon Airport on Saturday. 

They said they thought the 91-year-old, who was wearing sunglasses and was in a wheelchair, was asleep.

 Andrew Millea said the man's face fell against his, and it was "ice cold". "I knew straight away that the man was dead, but they reassured me that he 'always sleeps like that'," he said. 

Well, they’re economical up in Oldham. It seems like a normal ticket costs less than space in freight. It’s the Ryanair effect. 

Bodies, incidentally, aren’t ice cold: they assume ambient temperature, which must have been fairly high if Mr Jarant had been fermenting over the course of a 40 mile taxi ride. If he was cold – and had been dead for 24 hours – then he must have been put in some form of refrigeration. 

Personally I’d rather travel with a corpse, assuming it isn’t too ripe, than, say a peevish child. Or this chap.

Comments

[ajay]

Bodies assume ambient temperature but they feel cold*. Some things do - metal or glass objects feel colder than plastic, even if they're all really at the same temperature. Also, they're colder than you expect (because they're not at body temperature) and that translates into "surprisingly cold".

"I knew straight away that the man was dead, but they reassured me that he 'always sleeps like that'," he said.

"No! He is resting!"
"Look, mate, I know a dead German nonagenarian when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now."

[Richard J]

"Look, mate, I know a dead German nonagenarian when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now."

Now, if only it had been a flight from South America, there'd be an ex-Nazi joke in there. Mind, 91-year old German men do have a non-negligible chance of spending their early-20s in ways they'd prefer not to remember.

[ajay]

You have no idea of the satisfaction I get from knowing that Paul Krugman and I came up with the same joke at roughly the same time.

I realise that I left an unexplained * there. It was meant to point to a reassuring footnote explaining that my experience with handling dead bodies is limited to dead animals rather than actual human corpses.

[Richard J]

Is that reassuring? I'm starting to question your experience in cadaveral (cadavereal? cadaverous?) matters.

[ajay]

Dead animals such as rabbits, etc, that I was about to cook and eat. I think that's less disturbing than admitting to familiarity with dead humans.

[jamie]

Well I was a mortuary porter way back, so I'm comfortable with corpses. They were my ONLY FRIENDS! (sobs, croons to self, etc)

"Mind, 91-year old German men do have a non-negligible chance of spending their early-20s in ways they'd prefer not to remember"

He was, apparently, an ex-pilot, though nobody's mentioned the word "Luftwaffe" yet.

[Tom]

"I liked bombing Oldham so much, I came back and lived in the ruins"

My late grandmother (also German, as it tenuously happens) lived in a village with an ex-USAF wartime bomber base attached. One of the Yanks stayed after the war, marrying a local girl and living in the village. At his funeral they had a chap from RAF Mildenhall doing the flag presentation thing and a B-17 doing a flypast. Yes, they got the right village.

[a]

About that chap, his true claim to fame seems to have been forgotten in his epitaph. (Unless "enthusiasm" and "absolute fearlessness" is code for "defecating on the food cart...using linen napkins as toilet paper".)

[Cian]

Early onset Alzheimer's would have been a major contributor to "that chap's" behaviour. The alcohol probably didn't help, but was probably only a secondary contributor. Poor fucker.