We all knew this in our hearts, but now we have proof: good TV saves lives.
An Arizona man who saved a woman’s life on the side of the road says that the closest thing to first aid training he’d ever experienced was the CPR episode of The Office – and it worked.
“I’ve never prepared myself for CPR in my life,” Scott told the Arizona Daily Star. “I had no idea what I was doing.”
Tucson tyre technician Cross Scott had been been test driving a customer’s car when he spotted another vehicle rolling slowly on the side of the road with its hazard lights on.
He wedged a rock under a front wheel, broke a window to get to the unconscious driver, and then when he found she didn’t seem to have a pulse, began CPR.
The thing is, as much as everything tends to go wrong at Dunder Mifflin training days, the bit about how the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’ is a good tempo for the chest compressions? That’s actually a thing.
“As Scott straddled the woman and began chest compressions, he sang the song out loud. All he was thinking about was Michael Scott’s face, singing “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”
While Scott (the real-life one) says the real heroes are the paramedics who turned up a few minutes later and took the woman to hospital, one of them assured him that he could very well have saved her life.
And if there’s one thing Michael Scott knows, it’s that a well-intentioned man with no idea what he’s doing can still make a big difference.