The Dumb and Dumber

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Whilst going through the news items this morning there was one that had the punch line about passengers having to empty their bladders before the flight to make the plane lighter.

 

When I started reading the page I realised this isn't aviation news but rather belongs in here:

 

Source: http://www.recreationalflying.com/forum/aviation-news/68507-year-odd-dumb-strange-things.html#post155700

 

A Year of Odd, Dumb and Strange Things

 

By David R. Butcher

 

Toxic perfume, breaking the Internet and bombing the moon — 2009 marked another year of office oddities, bungled business and strange science.

 

Like all serious things, the workplace, business and science are rife with strange and stupid things. Here we look back at some of 2009's more offbeat developments and discoveries, which took place in offices, boardrooms, laboratories and beyond.

 

OFFICE ODDITIES

 

1) Weeks after Bank of America completed its deal to buy struggling broker Merrill Lynch, with the help of $138 billion in taxpayer-funded promises, it was revealed that Merrill's then-CEO had spent $1.22 million of company money to refurbish his office at Merrill headquarters — including $87,000 for an area rug and $35,000 for a "commode on legs" — while preparing to slash expenses and exit businesses to fix the ailing securities firm.

 

2) A woman in New Zealand was fired from her accounting job for sending out e-mail written in capitalized, multicolored and bolded words. Her employer, a health-care firm, claims that she "had caused disharmony in the workplace by using block capitals, bold typeface and red text in her emails," which her coworkers at the firm found too aggressive and "confrontational" for their tastes. She was awarded $11,500 on the premise that the company had no official e-mail style guide, therefore her messages did not amount to grounds for dismissal.

 

3) A 23-year-old hotel cleaner in Scotland simply wanted a day off from work. Rather than ask for one, though, he claimed he had been assaulted. To convince his boss, he took a razor from his pocket and repeatedly dragged it down his face. He also picked up a boulder and repeatedly hit himself on the head and body. He went to the police station to report the supposed assault. When asked about the incident, the hotel cleaner said, "Looking back, I should have just phoned work and asked them for the day off."

 

4) When nearly 150 people at a Texas bank call center became ill, reporting dizziness and shortness of breath, officials suspected carbon monoxide or some other toxic fume was the culprit. But when two people complained about dizziness after a coworker sprayed perfume and others began to feel sick, it was discovered that the perfume was to blame. Thirty-four people were taken to hospitals, 12 by ambulance, and 110 people were treated on the scene. Investigators do not know what type of perfume was sprayed.

 

5) Among the oddest employee complaints addressed to hiring managers last year: Employee is trying to poison me; Employee breathes too loudly; Employee eats all the good cookies; Employee's aura is wrong; Employee suspected coworker is a pimp; Employee's body is magnetic and keeps de-activating my magnetic access card; Employee has bells on her shoes and it's not the holidays; Employee smells like road ramps.

 

6) In October, a New Jersey man pleaded guilty to theft and was ordered to repay around $470,000 in compensation for a job he accepted but never worked. The man accepted a position with Avaya a number of years ago, but changed his mind before he actually began working there. He was already in the payroll system, though, and the company ended up depositing his checks even though he never worked there. This continued for five years, until his attempt to make an early withdrawal from his employee retirement savings account prompted an investigation that led to his arrest in 2007.

 

DUMB BUSINESS

 

1) Following a record fiscal-year loss, British Airways asked its 40,000 employees in June to consider working up to a month for free. The CEO of the U.K. airline said he would also forfeit his entire July salary in the hopes his staff would follow suit. Of course, his annual salary at the time was more than $1.2 million. Only 800 workers took up the offer and British Airways' stock price dropped 14 percent in the three weeks following the proposal.

 

2) To promote a new line of grilled chicken, KFC recruited Oprah Winfrey to help spread the word by telling viewers that anyone who downloaded a coupon within a two-day period would get a free two-piece grilled chicken meal. But the promotion backfired. People went nuts for the free chicken, and the chain gave away 4 million meals before it began refusing coupon-holders and turning them away, angering millions of customers in the process.

 

3) At the New York Auto Show, a week after receiving a 60-day deadline to avoid bankruptcy, General Motors Corp., in partnership with Segway, unveiled a two-wheeled, two-seat, rickshaw-looking electric vehicle dubbed P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility). Capable of speeds up to 35 miles per hour with a range up to 35 miles between recharges, it didn't do much to change popular opinion about the company that had ridden large SUVs to the verge of nonexistence.

 

4) A twofer:

 

A) After requiring massive taxpayer bailouts to stay afloat, it was reported that insurance giant American International Group (AIG) was using $165 million of that cash to dole out huge employee bonuses to top-level executives. The public was none too understanding.

 

B) Meanwhile, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told an Iowa radio station that AIG executives should "either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide."

 

5) As one of several conservation measures, All Nippon Airways (ANA) recently announced it would be asking passengers on some of its flights to use a bathroom before boarding rather than relieving themselves on the plane. The Japanese airline claimed that empty bladders mean lighter passengers, a lighter aircraft and thus lower fuel use. Airline staff were present at boarding gates to ask passengers to use a bathroom before embarking. The test ran through October and aimed for a 4.2-ton emission reduction. The airline hasn't said whether the pre-flight toilet trips made a difference.

 

6) What was essentially a typo nearly brought down the Swedish Internet in October. A coding error during maintenance shut down the entire .se domain, crippling access to any Web site or e-mail ending in .se. The outage, which lasted about an hour, meant that the entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working.

 

STRANGE SCIENCE

 

1) In the name of science, NASA bombed the moon in October. The space agency's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) traveled 5.6 million miles during an historic 113-day mission that ended in the creation of twin impacts on the moon's surface in a search for water ice. First, LCROSS and its spent Centaur upper stage rocket separated about 54,000 miles above the surface of the moon, and Centaur, moving at a speed of more than 1.5 miles per second, hit the lunar surface. Five minutes later, the LCROSS impacted the surface in a permanently shadowed region near the moon's south pole.

 

2) A study of data from the Framingham Heart Study this past year led researchers to believe that loneliness spreads through social networks like a virus. The researchers — from the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego — found loneliness is contagious with three degrees of separation. That is, a person's loneliness depends not just on his friend's loneliness but also on his friend's friend and his friend's friend's friend. The finding suggests that the tendency to be a loner may be less of a character trait and more of a "state such as hunger."

 

3) An Italian archaeologist last year discovered what he says is the partial body and skull of a 16th century plague victim that shows her jaw was forced open by a brick — a medieval exorcism technique used on suspected vampires. Gravediggers shoved a rock into her skull to prevent her from chewing through her shroud and infecting others with the plague. According to the team leader from the University of Florence, last year was the first time that archaeological remains have been interpreted as belonging to a suspected vampire.

 

4) The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle collider, has faced a number of problems, including the threat of malevolent time travelers. One of the more absurd troubles was something LHC scientists didn't think to safeguard against: bread. In November, a bird dropped a baguette on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant overheating in parts of the accelerator and temporarily shutting down the whole operation. The incident didn't delay the LHC becoming the world's highest energy particle accelerator later in the month, sending two beams of protons speeding toward each other at nearly the speed of light, putting it back on track to find the Higgs boson.

 

5) DNA tests presented in October 2009 seemed to show that the skull purported to belong to Adolf Hitler is not his. Hitler committed suicide in 1945, and his remains were burned the following day by the Russian Army; one year later, bone fragments were recovered from the site and kept by Russian authorities until they were cremated in 1970, with the exception of part of the jawbone and a piece of the skull, which showed a bullet hole. Scientists who examined the skull fragment found it to be suspiciously small. DNA tests revealed that the skull is from a woman. Russia's FSB intelligence service, the successor to the KGB, last month rejected the doubts, saying the bones definitely belonged to Hitler.

 

6) The winner of the Peace Prize in 2009's Ig Nobels went to a Swiss research team for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full beer bottle or with an empty bottle.

 

In a year as unpredictable as 2009, when we learned to accept that pretty much anything could happen, some developments still managed to surprise us.