Habit's Hazards

Into a branch of the Tekoku Bank, Japan's largest, last week walked a middle-aged man of distinction wearing the arm band of a Tokyo municipal official. He said he was a city health inspector. Would the manager please summon all his employees for a dose of special anti-dysentery medicine?

The manager, a man with the habit of obedience to authority, lined up his underlings. The man with the arm band produced a bottle of colorless liquid and barked: "Drink this before locking the vaults." No one thought to ask why an anti-dysentery potion is not just as effective when a bank's vaults are locked. Obediently they gulped the medicine and collapsed in agony.

The medicine man slipped into the open vault, snatched an armful of currency and disappeared. In the hospital next day the manager ruefully totted up the cost of his gullibility: twelve employees dead from cyanide, and a loss of about 50,000 yen to the Tekoku Bank. Police were hunting the man of distinction.

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