Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (18 page)

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A woman from Donetsk, Ukraine, thought she was opening a can of beer she found in a train station, but she was actually pulling the pin out of a grenade. (You know how that goes.) The woman died; 17 other people were injured.

F
urniture.com
(1998–2000)

Great Idea:
Save shoppers the hassle of going to a furniture store, picking out a table, and figuring out how to get it home.

Fatal Flaw:
Only after the site’s owners shelled out a whopping $2.5 million for the domain name did they discover that neither FedEx nor UPS would ship a couch. More-expensive shipping companies were required, which meant that a $200 table cost $300 to ship. Plus, items took an average of one month to arrive at the customer’s home. The company lasted two years, falling apart in 2000. (The site is still live, albeit managed by a different company.)

Kozmo.com
(1998–2001)

Great Idea:
Deliver anything to anyone at any time.

Fatal Flaw:
It cost more to get the products to the customers than the customers had to pay for them. Available in nine U.S. cities, Kozmo offered free delivery of “videos, games, DVDs, music, mags, books, food, basics & more” in less than one hour, with no minimum purchase. That meant that if a stoner wanted a bag of Doritos at 4:00 a.m., a Kozmo driver would have to track down the Doritos and make it to the stoner’s apartment
in lightning speed. Despite obtaining $280 million from investors, Kozmo never made a profit. By the time it went bankrupt, it was nearly $20 million in the hole, and its failure put 1,100 people out of work.

Flooz.com
(1998–2001)

Great Idea:
Start a new form of Internet currency and hire Whoopi Goldberg as spokesperson. With an A-list celebrity endorser on hand, Flooz founder Robert Levitan was able to wrangle $35 million from investors and line up 30 “e-tailers,” including Barnes & Noble and Tower Records. Shoppers could earn “Flooz credits” (like airline miles) and then use the Flooz to buy real stuff at participating merchants.

Fatal Flaw:
There already was a form of Internet currency…called “money.” Traded in the form of “credit,” this money was backed by federal agencies and large private banks. Flooz, as far as customers were concerned, was backed by Whoopi Goldberg. (And much of the investment money Levitan generated was used to pay her.) As online shopping became safer in 2000 thanks to encryption software and firewalls, online shoppers preferred to buy directly from the store rather than through a third party. When the company went bankrupt, all existing Flooz credits were nullified and non-refundable. “I am going to cry,” grumbled one former Flooz holder. “I lost about $350. I have a good mind to write to Whoopi Goldberg!”

I
n May 2008, Charles Habib, a laborer
with John Roth Paving Pavemasters in New Castle, Pennsylvania, was awaiting a delivery of asphalt with his coworkers when someone found a bowling ball near the parking lot they were repaving. The men had shot-putting contests with the ball for a while, then someone put up a challenge to see if one of them could break the bowling ball with a sledgehammer. Habib grabbed a sledgehammer and cracked the ball with the first blow. The crew foreman spoke up at this point, telling Habib to knock it off, and that he wouldn’t be taking him to the hospital if he was injured. Habib smashed the ball again anyway, and a piece of the ball broke off—and flew straight into his right eye, cutting the eyeball. He required immediate surgery (no word on whether or not the foreman drove him to the hospital), and, worst of all: Habib eventually lost all sight in the eye. (Habib also lost his bid to get workers’ compensation for the on-the-job bowling ball–smashing injury.)

When real estate agent Peter Collard
arrived at the six-bedroom house he was trying to sell in Brisbane, Australia, in 2010, he was horrified to discover that half of the yard was dug up and 10
palm trees had been ripped out of the ground. Next to the devastation were two confused-looking workmen and a backhoe. When Collard asked them what they doing, the men quickly loaded the backhoe onto the trailer and, without a word, drove away. According to police, they were digging a swimming pool, but due to an address mix-up, they were at the wrong house. Collard’s insurance company denied his claim for compensation. Cost of the repair: $20,000.

The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant
was shut down for about a week in 1986. Reason: Some of the plant’s employees were messing around and accidentally threw a rolled-up pair of gloves—a makeshift ball—into a backup safety tank.

On September 18, 1977, the Tennessee Valley Authority
had to close its Knoxville nuclear power plant. The plant stayed shut for 17 days, at a cost of $2.8 million. Cause of the shutdown: “human error.” A shoe had fallen into an atomic reactor.

In September 1978, a sailor
accidentally dropped a 75-cent paint scraper into the torpedo launcher of the nuclear sub USS
Swordfish
. The sub was forced to scrap its mission so repairs could be performed in dry dock. Cost to U.S. taxpayers: $171,000.

L
ake Conemaugh, contained behind the South Fork Dam outside of Pittsburgh, was the private playground of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, organized in the 1870s by steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick as a retreat for the city’s upper crust. The club made several changes over the next decade that weakened the dam, including a wider roadway across the top to accommodate their luxury carriages. This lowered the dam, bringing it only four feet above the spillway that kept it from overflowing.

Heavy rains in May 1889 raised the lake to within a few feet of the roadway. By the morning of May 31, water was pouring over the top. Despite the club’s last-minute attempts to reinforce it, at 3:10 p.m. the dam gave way, sending a 35-foot wall of water and trees—not to mention the remains of the dam—gushing toward Johnstown, 14 miles downstream. Survivors said the sound was “a roar like thunder.”

Ten minutes after the water reached Johnstown, four square miles of the city were gone. Sixteen hundred homes were leveled. An official telegraphed Pittsburgh, saying simply, “Johnstown is annihilated.” All told, 2,209 people died.

A
Texas high school science teacher named Brandi Bastas nearly killed herself and her students in September 2012. She was showing the class how to identify certain proteins and amino acids. But she failed to demonstrate how to keep two volatile substances—nitric acid and cyanide—from combining. A little spill from a test tube onto the lab table was all it took.

Bastas told everyone to get away from the table. Then she ran into the hallway and started vomiting. Then one of her students felt a burning rash on his skin. Then another one did, too. Then more had trouble breathing. Describing the scene, student Karin Ortiz said everyone was “freaked out.”

When the teacher and five affected students arrived at the nurse’s office, school administrators thought it might be a good idea to evacuate the classroom and the adjacent rooms. Thankfully, the chemicals dissipated before any serious injuries occurred, but the victims had to be treated at a local hospital.

T
he major cities of Europe are not all that far apart geographically, especially since a rail system unites the Continent. In May 1981, the Elthams, a couple from Dover, England, decided to take a day trip to Boulogne, in northern France, a distance of about 70 miles. They had a nice time sightseeing and shopping, but because they were unable to read French, they misread street signs and ended up wandering away from the town center and getting lost. Fortunately, they were able to explain the situation to some strangers, who gave them a ride back to the Boulogne train station, where they decided to take a train to Paris. The ticket took up most of the cash they had left.

Again, as they couldn’t read French, they stayed on the train too long and ended up in Luxembourg, not Paris. Having been awake for over 24 hours during their odyssey, they fell asleep on the train ride back to Paris…and woke up in Basel, Switzerland. Swiss police sent them back to Belfort, France, where they were told that in order to make the Boulogne connection, they’d have to get
to Montbeliard. Short on funds, they walked…15 miles. The town housed them for free in a hostel and allowed them to call home to Dover, but they couldn’t reach any family or friends.

The Elthams then decided to get temp jobs in Montbeliard to earn money to get back to Dover, but again, they couldn’t speak French, and there were no jobs to be had anyway. After a couple of days, the police escorted them back to Belfort. Once again, the Elthams wandered off and ended up walking 38 miles to Vesoul, from which they took a train into Paris. At the Paris train station, they read the schedules wrong and hopped a train to Bonn, Germany, where German police dumped them out just over the border, in Switzerland.

There, their luck changed. A policeman drove them to Boulogne, where they spent 24 hours in a holding cell explaining their ordeal to customs and immigration officials, who carefully put them on a train back to Dover. Or at least, to just outside of Dover. They walked the final 23 miles home.

4 REAL, UNFORTUNATELY NAMED BOOKS

Scouting for Boys

Pooh Gets Stuck

The Best Dad Is a Good Lover

Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story

Y
our pick!
A Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, news anchor was talking up a local event in February 2012. She meant to tell viewers that they could get tickets online at
Picatic.com
. Instead, she said “
pick-a-dick.com
.” She and her fellow female anchor immediately covered their mouths with their hands, then started giggling uncontrollably. The first anchor finally got herself together and repeated the new copy…and made the same mistake again. Bonus: The local event she was talking about was “King of the Kielbasa”—a sausage-making festival. And after she said “pick a dick” the first time, her co-anchor said, “Well, you were thinking about sausage.”