It couldn't happen here.

Milgram lives, apparently.


"Ogborn was told to empty her pockets and surrender her car keys and cell phone, which she did. Then the caller demanded that Summers have Ogborn remove her clothes — even her underwear — leaving her with just a small, dirty apron to cover her naked body.

"Summers says she never second-guessed what she was being asked to do, as she firmly believed the person she was talking to was a police officer. Ogborn says she trusted her manager to do what was right."


As the story gets worse, changing from mere lewdness to outright physical and sexual abuse, the sickness of the caller seems of secondary importance to the trusting stupidity of those transferring the orders:


"'I honestly thought he was a police officer and what I was doing was the right thing,' said Summers. 'I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.'"


McDonald's will undoubtedly escape litigation, since their training manual, for some reason, cautions against bogus police officers conducting strip searches. (Now that's covering all bases.) Nonetheless --


"It turned out that the Panama City Police Department had received several calls about investigations in multiple states for similar incidents. By early 2004, there had been more than 70 cases of hoax phone calls to fast food restaurants, dating as far back as 1994.

"At a McDonald's in Hinesville, Ga., a caller convinced a 55-year-old janitor to do a cavity search of a 19-year-old cashier, while in Fargo, N.D., a manager at a local Burger King strip-searched a 17-year-old female employee."


It might be arguable, if not in a court of law at least on a philosophical level, that corporate culture creates an ethos of compartmentalized obedience in which personal responsibility, the capacity for individual moral choice, and the mental appartus required to question authoirty are gradually eroded in a sort of overriding soul-decay. Based on no statistical evidence and only on our own powers of reasoning, we'll adopt that point of view. Yet the individuals in question must be considered -- are they morally different from us right-thinking types, or secretly just the same?

It is well and good to believe in the essential goodness of our fellow men. It helps reassure us that our country will not turn into Nazi Germany, that authority can be trusted, that we can count on others to help pick up the slack of our own lazy thinking.

Yet we would all do well to consult our training manuals, it seems.