Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents Read online

  BUSINESS BLUNDERS

  In 1963 an eight-year-old West Virginia girl ate her box of Cracker Jack, and then got to her “free surprise” inside: a booklet called “Erotic Sexual Positions from Around the World.” Cracker Jack manufacturer Borden said that six books in all were found around the U.S., and attributed them to “an individual with a very sick sense of humor.”

  •There are thousands of apps for Apple’s iPhone, but none has drawn more complaints than the “Baby Shaker”: a video game in which the player shakes the iPhone until a virtual baby stops crying (then two red X’s appear over its eyes). The app was available for download for just two days in 2009 before Apple removed it. The company explained that it should have been rejected before it was added, but someone must have “missed it.” Alex Talbot, the app’s designer, admitted, “Yes, the Baby Shaker was a bad idea.”

  •Potato-chip company Walkers held a contest in 2010 that awarded prize money to customers who accurately predicted the weather. Entrants had to buy a 65-cent pack of Walkers chips, then, using the two game pieces in the bag, go to the company’s website and predict when and where in the country it would rain. If they did so correctly, they won about $16. What went wrong? Walkers is an extremely popular brand of snacks in England, where it rains a lot. And the contest was held in the fall, when it really rains a lot. As far as weather statistics in England go, contestants had a better than 1-in-3 chance of predicting a rainy day. Finally, when an especially rainy week was set to occur, Walkers took the contest website down with no warning.

  •In 1983, Paul McCartney collaborated with Michael Jackson on a song called “Say, Say, Say,” which would ultimately become a #2 hit. At the time, Jackson was at the peak of his fame, with his Thriller album selling as many as a million copies a week. On the set of the video for their hit single “Say, Say, Say,” Jackson asked McCartney, ludicrously wealthy as a Beatle and successful solo artist, for tips on how to manage his newfound wealth. McCartney told him that the real money in music is in publishing—buying the rights to popular songs. Whenever those songs get played on the radio or used in movies or TV commercials, the owner of the publishing rights gets a cut. Good idea, thought Jackson. So in 1984, when Associated Television Corporation’s catalog of 4,000 songs went on sale, Jackson bought it for $47.5 million. Among those songs? Most Beatles songs.

  SODA JERKS

  The staff at a Family Dollar store in Kansas City, Missouri, were having trouble with a food thief—one of the employees would routinely steal others’ food and drinks out of a staff refrigerator and consume them. To teach him a lesson, the store’s assistant manager dropped a total of 50 dissolving laxative tablets into two 20-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola, then resealed the bottles with glue to make them look unopened, then put them in the staff fridge, knowing the food thief would have his way with them…and get a nasty surprise (eventually).

  The target of the prank, however, noticed the undissolved tablets in the Cokes (there were a lot of tablets, after all) and decided to pull a prank of his own—he put the bottles with the Cokes in a cooler on the sales floor, where customers can buy them. Later that day, a 54-year-old woman bought one of the Cokes and drank some before noticing the laxative residue in the bottle. She returned to the Family Dollar to complain, and while doing so, became violently ill in the way that consuming more than a dozen laxative pills can do. She had to be hospitalized, and even though Family Dollar’s corporate office called her to apologize and offered her a $200 gift card, she sued the store. Both employees involved were fired and arrested.

  CIVIC ERRORS

  Awork crew was sent to dredge a clogged canal in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1978. In just a few hours they pulled out all of the household waste local residents had thrown in, such as rusted car parts, old appliances, even a heavy chain attached to a large wooden block. The crew then took a break for tea time. That’s when a resident noticed that the canal water was violently swirling around, and that the water level was quickly dropping. The work crew had removed the canal’s plug. In just a few minutes, the mile-and-a-half-long canal had drained into the river.

  •In a Ventura, California, parade, a drum major threw a baton high into the air, where it struck a power line. It shorted out, leading to a 10-block power outage, putting a radio station off the air, and started a grass fire.

  •In 1992 the Greenville, South Carolina, Department of Social Services sent out this letter to a deceased food stamp recipient: “Your food stamps will be stopped because we received notice that you passed away. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.”

  THE INFLATABLE TRUCKER

  In May 2011, New Zealand truck driver Steven McCormack was cleaning his truck at his company’s workshop in Whakatane, on the east coast of the country’s North Island. McCormack was standing on the rigging between his truck’s cab and trailer when he slipped. As he began to fall, he knocked a high-pressure air-brake hose of its nozzle. When he landed, that pointy brass nozzle—which was releasing air at 120 pounds per square inch—punctured McCormack’s skin, right in his butt.

  McCormack’s body immediately began to inflate. “His body started to literally blow up!” McCormack’s boss, Robbie Petersen, who witnessed the accident, told reporters afterward. “Before we knew it, his face went up like a balloon!” Mc-Cormack’s butt was stuck to the nozzle for more than a minute before a coworker finally hit a safety valve that shut the air off. By that time, Mc-Cormack’s body had inflated to twice its normal size—and he was screaming in agony.

  Someone called 111 (New Zealand’s 911). Both of the small town’s two ambulances were busy, and a rescue helicopter was on a mission more than two hours away. So coworkers lifted McCormack off the nozzle and laid him down on the ground. They placed ice packs around the wound and also around his neck, which was dangerously puffed up with air. (“I felt like the Michelin Man,” McCormack said later.) It took an hour for paramedics to arrive.

  Doctors said McCormack was lucky to have survived the freak accident. The high-pressure air had filled and swollen his buttocks and legs as well as his abdomen and chest—dangerously compressing his heart and lungs. Air had even collected behind McCormack’s eyeballs. Doctors also said that the air had separated muscle from fat in various places around McCormack’s body, and that they were surprised it didn’t rupture his skin.

  But in the end, all was well: McCormack was out of the hospital in a couple of days and back to work in a few of weeks. And all that extra air in his body? It left the natural way—via burps and farts.

  THREE ELECTION GAFFES

  Good joke. Comic Jacob Haugaard ran for the Danish parliament in 1994. He ran under the Union of Conscientiously Work-Shy Elements party, of which he was the only member. Campaign promises included better weather, shorter lines in stores, and other things out of his control, satirizing campaign promises. And yet, he got more than 23,000 votes…enough for a seat in the parliament.

  Did I forget something? Herbert Connolly had to campaign hard to retain his seat on the Massachusetts Governor’s Council in 1988. He did “Get out the vote” activities all day on Election Day. He worked so hard that he lost track of the time and got to his precinct to vote for himself, 15 minutes too late. Final election results: 14,715 to 14,716—in his opponent’s favor.

  Decline of the machines. In 2007 Domenic Volpe ran for the Virginia legislature. His campaign used “robocall” machines to deliver campaign messages. Most find these annoying at any time, but Volpe’s campaign inadvertently set the machines to make the calls at 2 a.m. Had he not alienated hundreds, he may have won the election.

  CELEBRITY MARRIAGE WEIRDNESS

  During production on The Ben Stiller Show in 1992, cast member Janeane Garofalo and writer Rob Cohen were dating. On a trip to Las Vegas, they got drunk and got married at one of the city’s many drive-through chapels. They thought the marriage wasn’t real. “We thought you have to go to the downtown courthouse and sign papers and stuff,” Garofalo later
recalled. The couple split up a few months after. Garofalo became a major comedian, while Cohen went on to produce and write for The Big Bang Theory. In 2012 he proposed to his girlfriend. Only then, when Cohen’s lawyer was getting his records in order, did Garofalo and Cohen realize they had actually been legally married in 1992… and still were. Garofalo and Cohen amicably reunited and divorced a few weeks later.

  •Actor Ryan O’Neal was the longtime companion of actress Farrah Fawcett. Moments after Fawcett’s funeral in 2009, O’Neal was taken aback when “a beautiful blond” came up and hugged him. Despite having just put the love of his life in the ground, O’Neal asked the woman if she wanted to go get a drink. “Daddy, it’s me,” replied actress Tatum O’Neal, his estranged daughter.

  ONE FALSE STROKE

  SPELL CZECH

  The town council for the British town of Kirklees decided to promote itself and the surroundings as the ideal hamlet for bicycling. However, before printing up more than 7,000 brochures, nobody noticed some major spelling mistakes. “Cleckheaton” was misspelled as “Czechisation,” “Birstall” became “Bistable,” “Kirkburton” became “Kirkpatrick,” and even “Kirklees” became “Kirtles.” An e-mail address for British Waterways was listed as the wildly inaccurate “enquiries.manic-depressive@brutalisation’s.co.uk.” A council spokesman blamed the errors on the printer’s software.

  UNLIKE

  In 2009, when Sir John Sawer was appointed head of MI6, the British government’s spy agency, his wife, Shelley, posted the good news on her Facebook page. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sawer hadn’t enabled any of the social networking site’s privacy features, meaning that anyone with Internet access could see her page, which contained sensitive information about her and her husband, including where they lived, places they frequently visited, and photos of their children. After the leak was discovered, Mrs. Sawer hastily made her Facebook page accessible to friends only.

  ZOO, SCREW, SUE

  In 2001 Marguerite Nunn intended to donate a $130 check to Zoo to You, a nonprofit wildlife education program. But due to what was later deemed a “software error” on her computer, her zip code was entered into the amount box on the check. Result: She donated $93,447. When Nunn, an innkeeper from Paso Robles, California, realized the error two weeks later, she asked for Zoo to You to return her money. But they’d already spent more than half of it. (The check had cleared the bank because Nunn and her husband, Tom, had recently sold some property and deposited the proceeds.) The nonprofit paid back $30,000, and then a little more over the next few years, but nothing came after 2006. Seeing no other choice, the Nunns sued. In 2009, they were awarded a settlement reported as “somewhere in the middle.”

  JUST SAY NO

  The Florida House of Representatives voted down a law to widen government-paid health services in 1990. The bill was rejected by a single vote, that of Representative Mike Langton. Or, more accurately, of his 12-year-old son. Langton stepped away to make a phone call, leaving the boy to play at his desk on the House floor. The bill came up for a vote, and the younger Langton fiddled around with the electronic voting device and accidentally cast a no vote. The elder Langton had intended to vote yes.

  THE ROGUE TRADER

  In 1992 a British commodities trader named Nick Leeson moved to Singapore to manage futures markets for Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in the United Kingdom. Leeson, then only in his mid-20s, was given a great deal of responsibility—and a salary to match—by the bank, and lived it up in Singapore. Leeson was banned from a fancy cricket club for shouting a racial slur. He also spent a night in jail after a booze-fueled mooning spree.

  Eager to fund his increasingly lavish lifestyle, Leeson began making risky investments on behalf of Barings. Initially, they paid off, netting him a large bonus on top of his annual salary because he earned millions for the bank. Then his luck changed. As his losses began to mount, he attempted to hide them in an “error account” (which are typically used by traders to correct mistakes) which he labeled “88888” (8 is a lucky number in Chinese numerology). Now a chief trader with Barings, Leeson exploited his new title to conceal a rapidly expanding negative cash flow.

  At the end of 1992, the error account contained £2 million (about $1.32 million) worth of Leeson’s mistakes. That amount blazed to an astonishing £208 million ($137 million) by Christmas 1994. The young trader’s house of cards came crashing down when he made a series of overly optimistic bets on the Japanese stock market on January 16, 1995. An earthquake struck Kobe the following morning, sending markets across Asia, and Leeson’s investments, into a tailspin. Leeson fled.

  “THERE WAS NO WAY THE BANK COULD COVER HIS LOSSES OF $1.3 BILLION.”

  Leeson’s carelessness quickly brought Barings to the brink of collapse. There was no way the bank could cover his losses of $1.3 billion. While the media began predicting the imminent demise of the bank, an international manhunt was on. Rumor hounds speculated that Leeson had zoomed off to another Asian nation or that he was sailing the high seas on a private yacht. Actually, he was holed up at the five-star Regent Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Leeson and his wife later attempted to flee to Britain, but he was nabbed at the Frankfurt Airport in Germany on March 2.

  By then, Barings had been declared insolvent. It was eventually sold to ING, a Dutch banking and insurance firm, for the meager sum of a single pound, bringing a somber end to more than 230 years of banking history.

  Leeson spent more than three and a half years in a Singapore prison but was released in 1999 after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Leeson eventually bounced back. He managed to beat cancer, remarried, and these days he lectures at business conventions on the topic of “corporate responsibility.”

  ZERO TOLERANCE

  Feet ‘n’ meat. Kaylin Frederich went into a Burger King in Sunset Hills, Missouri, with two relatives in August 2009. After the family had started eating, an employee told them that they had to leave—because Kaylin wasn’t wearing shoes, a violation of the restaurant’s “no shoes, no shirt, no service” policy. What was unusual about that? Kaylin was six months old at the time and was being carried by her mother because she wasn’t old enough to walk. Her mother, Jennifer Frederich, alerted the media, prompting a quick apology from Burger King.

  Cold case. Many states restrict or ban the sale of cold medicines that contain the ingredient pseudoephedrine because it can be used to make crystal methamphetamine. In Indiana, you can buy only a certain amount of pseudoephedrine-based medicines in a seven-day period (and you have to fill out a form). But 70-year-old Sally Harpold didn’t know that. One day in 2009, she bought a box of Zyrtec for her husband (who had allergies), and a few days later she bought her adult daughter some Mucinex-D for a cold. That put her over the purchasing limit, so Harpold was arrested for intent to manufacture crystal meth. The charges were later dropped.

  He was unarmed. Steve Valdez of Tampa, Florida, went to a Bank of America branch in August 2009 to cash a check from his wife, but the bank refused to cash it. Why? Because B of A required a thumb-print as a form of identification, and Valdez could not provide one: He has two prosthetic arms. Even after presenting two forms of identification, he was denied and told by the manager to either come back with his wife or open an account. Bank of America later apologized to Valdez.

  Alex remains silent. In 2007 Shelby Sendelbach, a sixth-grader at Mayde Creek Junior High in Katy, Texas, confessed to writing “I love Alex” on the wall of the school gym. Shelby was called to the principal’s office, questioned by a police officer, read her rights, and charged with a “Level 4 infraction”—the same level applied to gun possession and making terrorist threats. (Only Level 5—for sexual assault and murder—is worse.) And she was sentenced to a special “disciplinary” school for four months. Officials said they were just following the rules. (They later reversed their decision and made Shelby write a letter of apology.)

  Babyfat. In 2009 Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Health Plans (RMHP) refused to cover Alex Lange bec
ause he had a preexisting condition: obesity. Alex’s parents were furious. Why? “He’s only four months old,” his father, Bernie, said to reporters. “He’s breast-feeding. We can’t put him on the Atkins diet or on a treadmill.” Amid all the negative press (“RMHP Denies Healthy but Big Baby!”), the company explained that it had a relatively new process of determining which babies were most “insurable”—and at 17 pounds, Alex didn’t make that list. RMHP has since changed its policy to insure any healthy baby, regardless of weight.

  Wackberry. In 2012 Chris Evans used his brand-new BlackBerry, which he hadn’t quite figured out yet, to text a filthy come-on to his girlfriend. Except that he didn’t send it to his girlfriend. Well, he did, but he also sent it to every single person on his contacts list. That alone would make for embarrassment several dozen times over, but it gets worse. Evans, 24, is a community-center swimming teacher in Birmingham, England. The message was sent to two female students, 13 and 14 years old. Under British law, that’s a sexual offense against a minor. Evans was sentenced to 18 months in prison but was released after two—the judge said Evans’s mistake was due to “misguided use” of his BlackBerry.