Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (5 page)

A
shocking development.
Michael Anderson Godwin was convicted of murder in South Carolina in 1989. Somehow, he avoided the electric chair and got life in prison instead. Then one day, while sitting on a steel toilet in his cell, he was trying to repair a pair of headphones…while they were plugged in. He electrocuted himself and died.

If at first you don’t succeed…
An unnamed 30-year-old man in Kent, New York, attempted suicide by jumping out of a fourth-story window of an apartment building. But he landed on a parked car and survived. When he recovered, he tried again, jumping out the same window. He landed on the same car and fractured his ankle and wrist.

Mr. Clean.
When police found 18-year-old Michael Smeriglio of Port St. Lucie, Florida, he was in bad shape. There was a lot of blood… down there. Smeriglio told the cops he’d been shot by hoodlums. But he was lying. He was cleaning his gun when it fired. According to press reports, “The bullet went through his penis, his left testicle, and then lodged itself in his thigh.”

That bites.
Illinois Baptist minister Paul Wrenn performs tremendous feats of strength to demonstrate the power of faith, like pounding nails into boards with his bare hands, or letting parishioners jump on his stomach. At a 1988 service, he lifted a 385-pound man a few inches off the ground with his teeth, using a special mouthpiece. Then the mouthpiece slipped, immediately tearing five teeth out of Wrenn’s mouth, each of them reportedly left dangling by a nerve. Wrenn put the large man down, finished his sermon, then sought medical attention.

Burns’s burn.
In 2012, a drug cop, unnamed in press reports, completed a home search in Mercer Island, Washington. When he went to re-holster his gun, it fired. According to Mercer Island police commander Leslie Burns, “He did shoot his buttocks area, but he’ll be fine.” No word on the extent of injuries to his ego area.

It could have been any red, octagonal sign.
Police in St. Augustine, Florida, pulled over Leslie Richard Newton, 63, when they spotted him driving his Chevy Camaro erratically. Earlier on his joy ride, Newton had blasted through a stop sign. As in, he blasted through the sign itself, destroying it. Then he kept on driving. The reason the accident made news: Newton still had a chunk of the stop sign embedded in his skull when he was pulled over. According to reports, “Alcohol was a factor.”

J
UST ONE PAIR OF BINOCULARS.
David Blair, the original second officer on the
Titanic
, was relieved of duty shortly before the ship set off for New York on April 10, 1912. In Blair’s haste to leave, he forgot to turn over all of his equipment to his replacement. One of the forgotten items was the key to the crow’s nest telephone. Blair had also left the crow’s nest binoculars in his cabin. According to the testimony of surviving crew members, if the lookouts had been given the binoculars, they would have seen the iceberg sooner. And if they’d had access to the phone, they could have alerted the bridge sooner. Either scenario might well have given the
Titanic
enough time to safely change course.

JUST A MATTER OF DISTRIBUTION.
In 1965 journalist Lionel Burleigh announced that he was starting a brand-new newspaper to serve London, the
Commonwealth Sentinel
. He promised nonbiased reporting and truth telling, renting billboards to announce his paper as “Britain’s most fearless newspaper.” The first issue came out on February 6, 1965. That was the last issue. Spending all of his time writing articles, collecting ads, and getting the paper to press, Burleigh had neglected to arrange distribution. The first edition’s 50,000 copies were dumped outside the hotel where he was staying. By the time the matter was sorted out, the news in the paper was old news. The paper folded, having sold one issue, by Burleigh’s daughter to a pedestrian walking by the hotel.

JUST ONE PEDAL OVER.
In 1971 Helen Ireland of Auburn, California, got into her car to take her driver’s license test. She said good morning to the tester, started the engine, then pressed down on the accelerator instead of the clutch and drove straight through the DMV’s wall. Total time of driving test: about one second. (She didn’t pass.)

JUST ONE CONVERSION ERROR.
It was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was the left hand; they used metric units in their calculations while designing the Mars Climate Orbiter. Aerospace company Lockheed Martin was the right hand; they used the customary feet and inches. Then, nine months and 461 million miles after it launched in December 1998, the mismatched figures caused the orbiter’s space brakes to not fire in time. The craft, which weighed 750 pounds (or, if you prefer, 340 kilograms), hit the Martian atmosphere at the wrong angle and was never heard from again. Cost of the mission: $327 million.

I
n 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.

T
he 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.

A
work 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.