Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (6 page)

•
  
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.”

I
n 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.

G
ood 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.

D
uring 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.

S
PELL 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.