killing your coworkers

Today I learned that 34 people had to go to the hospital after someone at the call center where they worked sprayed perfume. It started with two people feeling dizzy and short of breath, but since I guess they weren't sure at first what happened, they told everybody with any symptoms to leave the building and called the fire department. So either perfume makes a lot of people sick and they don't notice unless someone points it out (this is actually pretty common -- feeling crummy can make people incredibly clueless), or call center workers figured talking to EMTs was more fun than talking on call center phones.

I'm betting they wouldn't have actually gone to the hospital if they were just shirking. But I bet if they'd known it was perfume to start with, they'd have ignored the whole thing because everybody's pretty sure all those undisclosed ingredients in perfume are perfectly safe, and never mind that pregnant women aren't supposed to wear it.