WORKER UNFAIRLY SACKED OVER FART ROW
Swede Goran Andervass was awarded $85,000 compensation in 2003 after a tribunal ruled that he was unfairly dismissed for telling off a co-worker for passing gas. The early-morning flatulence prompted an angry response from Andervass who was suspended and then made redundant after the farter complained to management. “My colleague was absolutely aware of the awful smell,” said Andervass. “It was pure provocation.” Commenting on the compensation award, the Swedish Work Environment Authority said: “If a fart is done on purpose when going into somebody’s office, it is important that management takes the matter seriously.”
BUILDING EVACUATED IN SCARE OVER PRESENTATION DEVICE
Thousands of people were evacuated from an office complex in Columbus, Ohio, in 2009 after an employee spotted a black box with lights, wires and a timer in one of the conference rooms. Only after several of the evacuated employees had been overcome by summer heat in the parking lot did it emerge that the suspicious item was simply a device designed to keep presentations short. The lights warn a speaker when it is time to shut up.
MIAMI GETS PARKING METER FAIRY
Miami acquired its very own parking meter fairy in 2004 when 37-year-old actor Xavier Cortes donned a curly pink wig, lavender tutu and fake wings and roller skated around the city putting change into meters that were about to run out. He had answered an advertisement placed by Coconut Grove retailers and restaurateurs who feared that visitors to the district were being discouraged by parking tickets. The advertisement stated that the successful candidate would be “a colourful one-of-a-kind extrovert who looks good in tulle”. Carrying a wand and armed with $40 in dimes, Cortes skated through the neighbourhood, leaving his calling card under windshield wipers: “You’ve just been saved by the Coconut Grove parking-meter fairy.”
MAN COVERS HIMSELF IN EXCREMENT TO CLOSE BANK ACCOUNT
An angry bank customer in Thailand smeared himself in human excrement before walking into a branch to close his account. Chuay Kotchasit said the stench would be more bearable than the “stink of mismanagement” at the bank. He was thought to be upset after losing $9,000 on a savings investment.
HOTELIER GIVES SERVICE WITH A SNARL
A hotelier in Maine was so routinely abusive that in 1999 he was ordered by a court not to have any contact whatsoever with his guests. The court heard how 66-year-old Clifford Shattuck, who owned the Lighthouse Motel in Lincolnville, “repeatedly threatened his customers in a scary and unusual way”. Fining him $15,000, Justice Donald Marden found that Shattuck was abusive towards people who asked to see rooms before they registered and towards those who used the motel driveway to turn around. It was not the first occasion that the hotelier had been in trouble. In 1994 he was fined for violating the civil rights of two Israeli tourists. They claimed Shattuck told them that Hitler “should have killed another six million Jews” and threw rocks at their car as they left.
SUSSEX PENSIONER KNITS BREASTS
Sussex octogenarian Audrey Horncastle has an unusual hobby – she knits woollen breasts. She gives them to her daughter, community nurse Rhona Emery, to help teach new mothers to breast feed. Mrs Horncastle, from Woodingdean, near Brighton, reckons she has knitted more than 100 breasts in three years. “I try to keep the basic fleshy tone,” she said, “but sometimes people ask if I can put in a bit of colour as well just to make things a bit different. People do tend to give me a strange look when I tell them what I am knitting.”
ROAD SIGN WORKERS FORGET TO USE SPELL-CHECK
California highway department employees, painting a large white warning sign on a road in 2002, made the mistake of doing so without first checking their spelling. The sign read “CRUVE”.
FIRM CHOOSES NAME ON ITS DOORSTEP
Norwich Union, Britain’s largest insurance firm, spent a year and $1.4 million on consultants, focus groups and research in 50 countries to come up with a new name. Eventually it chose Aviva, which just happened to be the same name as a small dress shop 300 yards from its head office. Although Norwich Union insisted that it hadn’t seen the dress shop before thinking up the name, it seemed more than a coincidence to the shop’s owner Annie Catlin. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said, adding that it had taken her ten minutes over a cup of coffee to think up the name Aviva, which is Hebrew for “joy of spring”.
WOMAN RINGS UP $120,000 TAB ON PSYCHIC HOTLINE
Cheryl Burnham, a clerk at a Los Angeles juvenile facility, was sentenced to 30 days in jail in 1999 for ringing up a $120,000 tab on her employer to a psychic hotline. She placed a total of 2,500 calls on county telephones to the psychic hotline in the Dominican Republic. The district attorney’s office commented: “Unfortunately the psychic failed to foresee the jail sentence.”
FIRM HIRES WITCH TO HUNT BAD DEBTORS
A debt-collecting firm from Vilnius, Lithuania, hired local witch Vilija Lobaciuviene to hunt down companies and individuals who were failing to repay outstanding debts during the 2009 credit crunch. “There are certain people who are using this crisis situation and refuse to pay banks or other companies,” said the firm’s director before adding ominously: “Our new employee will help them to understand the situation, reconsider what is right and wrong and act accordingly.” The country’s media called the move a “return to the Dark Ages”.
SACKED WORKER WREAKS TUNA REVENGE
Fired from Fanny’s Cabaret strip club in Ottawa, Canada, a woman vowed to take revenge on her employers. She carried out her threat by leaving bags filled with tuna all over the club – on tables, chairs, next to walls and in coat and champagne rooms. A number of guests complained of burning eyes and upset stomachs.
GRANNIES BANNED OVER BINGO BRAWL
Two grandmothers were banned for life from a Bridgend, Wales, bingo hall in 2002 after brawling over a supposedly lucky chair. Security staff had to pull the women apart as 500 other players watched in astonishment. Sandra Fry was arrested for punching Lynn Want who was taken to hospital with a broken nose and two black eyes. “She called me names for months,” protested Mrs Fry, “before I snapped and hit her. I didn’t plan it – it was one punch. I don’t know where it came from – I was just as shocked as she was.”
MAN ATTENDS DENTAL APPOINTMENT NAKED
A man turned up five days late for a dental appointment in Stratford, Connecticut, in 2009 – with no clothes on. A horrified female receptionist screamed and the naked man ran out. She was later able to identify him by his blue eyes and deep tan.
CCTV OPERATION TRAPS THIEVING MOUSE
Following dozens of cash thefts from the offices of a company in Villach, Austria, management decided to install closed-circuit television in a bid to catch the thief. The camera revealed that the culprit was a mouse which had been using 50-euro notes to build its nest.
CAR COMPANY SENT LETTERS TO “PASSED AWAY”
A widow received three letters from a car rental company that were not only addressed to her dead husband but also included the words “passed away” in the address. Cynthia Haigh, of Brighouse, West Yorkshire, lost her husband on Christmas Day 2006, but despite informing the new owners at Polar Ford in Huddersfield of his death, they kept sending letters to him. In December 2007, a letter arrived at her home addressed to Mr David Haigh, Passed Away Died, Brighouse, West Yorkshire. Although the family contacted the company and received a letter of apology, two more letters, addressed the same way, arrived at her home the following February.
STOLEN CORPSE DRESSED AS DARTH VADER
Three students in New York were accused of taking a corpse from a crypt, dressing it up as Star Wars villain Darth Vader and taking it to a fancy dress party.
BALD MAN, 49, IS ASKED TO PROVE HE IS OVER 18
When balding 49-year-old Maurice Harris tried to buy a bag of party poppers at a Tesco supermarket in Bedworth, Warwickshire, in 2009, staff told him they needed proof that he was over 18 because the poppers were classed as explosives. He was finally sold them when a security guard he
knew at the store vouched for him. Mr Harris said: “I’m 50 next month but I look older. I’ve hardly got a hair on my head.”
DRACULA DESCENDANT ENCOURAGES BLOOD DONORS
The last surviving descendant of Count Dracula (also known as fifteenth-century Transylvanian nobleman Vlad the Impaler) was enlisted by Germany’s Red Cross in 1999 to try to persuade people to become blood donors. Ottomar Rudolphe Vlad Dracul Prince Kretzulesco, who lived in the crumbling Castle Schenkendorf on the outskirts of Berlin, agreed to help the Red Cross after hearing a radio appeal for more donors. The count said he was happy to hold a blood donor session at the castle “although I will draw the line at letting them put up crosses”.
CLEAN-UP COMPANY PAINTS GRAFFITI TO BOOST BUSINESS
A Swedish graffiti clean-up company admitted in 1998 that it painted graffiti on buildings in Oerebro after the number of contracts it received diminished drastically because local police had been so successful in apprehending taggers. “The police were too effective in the battle against graffiti,” explained the clean-up company owner. “We were without work and started to paint graffiti ourselves. Otherwise we risked going bankrupt.”
SPELLING MISTAKES DISCOVERED IN LAKE SIGNS
As the result of a six-year campaign by the local newspaper, embarrassed officials in Webster, Massachusetts, finally admitted in 2009 that some road signs pointing to Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg were spelt incorrectly. Errors in the 45-letter name – said to be the longest place name in the United States – included inserting an “o” for a “u” in the 20th letter and an “h” for an “n” at the 38th letter. Among the two dozen other rejected variations was a 49-letter version with extra “g”s. The local Chamber of Commerce said it would attempt to find out who originally painted the signs and get them to correct them. Unsurprisingly local residents refer to the location as “Webster Lake”.
VISITORS RIOT ON DISCOVERING MERMAID WASN’T REAL
In a bid to boost visitor numbers to the city aquarium at East London, South Africa, in 1998, tourism director Craig Nancarrow hired 18-year-old aquarium guide Tessa du Toit to dress up as a mermaid. However when she refused to go into the water for fear that it would ruin her costume, some of the crowd of 350, lured by the promise of seeing a mermaid, reacted angrily and started throwing things at her. “They thought mermaids really existed,” said du Toit, “and things got a bit out of hand when they discovered the truth.”
WORKERS PAINT YELLOW LINES AROUND PARKED VAN
When Gordon Dickson parked his van in an Edinburgh street in 2002, it was in a perfectly legal place. However while he was away council workers started painting yellow lines around the van and stuck a $45 parking ticket on his windshield. The city council later quashed the fine.
“BOY STABBED FATHER IN ROW OVER VIDEO GAME TACTICS”
An Italian man who argued with his son over tactics on a Sony PlayStation soccer game was rushed to hospital after the boy allegedly stabbed him in the neck with a 15-inch kitchen knife. According to newspaper reports, the row broke out when the father offered his son Mario advice on how to improve his play on the video game FIFA 2009 – and then turned the TV off in response to the 16-year-old’s reaction. Police said that the teenager then fetched a knife from the kitchen and stabbed his father in the neck before returning to clean the weapon at the kitchen sink in front of his watching mother and leaving it to dry on the draining-board. The mother said she had no idea what had happened until her husband stumbled into the room, clutching his throat. She said the game had been given to her son as a birthday present a few days earlier. “Mario is obsessed,” she added. “He’s forever playing on his PlayStation, and we bought him FIFA 2009 because we didn’t want him playing violent games.”
PRESERVATION GROUP TARGETS WRONG BOAT
For eight years a Tennessee preservation group called Raise the Gunboat campaigned tirelessly to raise enough money to bring up the Tawah, part of a Union fleet that was sunk in the Tennessee River in 1864. They had managed to collect $220,000 when they suddenly discovered to their horror that the wreck on the river bed was not the Tawah but a barge that may have been built as late as 1925. “They didn’t have the right boat,” sighed Memphis archaeologist Stephen James. “They’re good guys, but they’re not archaeologists.”
FARMER ACCIDENTALLY ANAESTHETIZES HIMSELF
A Chinese farmer who was supposed to be anaesthetizing deer accidentally knocked himself out for 11 hours after the needle pierced his skin. Mr Liu was using a strong animal anaesthetic to tranquilize the deer at his farm in Chongqing so that he could harvest their antlers for Chinese medicine. But after administering a shot to one deer, he noticed anaesthetic dripping from the needle and made the mistake of using his hand to wipe it dry. No sooner had the needle made contact with his skin than the hapless farmer was laid out cold. Doctors later said the anaesthetic was so powerful it could have knocked out an elephant in less than a minute.
NUDISTS SIGN BOOSTS SHOPKEEPER’S TRADE
Bernard Patenaude, proprietor of the Pomfret Spirit Shoppe, was certain that he would get much more passing trade if drivers on Route 169 between Pomfret and Woodstock, Connecticut, didn’t race past so quickly. So he had a big sign painted: SLOW DOWN NUDISTS CROSSING AHEAD. The ruse worked a treat. Motorists slowed right down; some even turned round and crawled back. As a result, business at the Pomfret Spirit Shoppe was booming. However the state police took a dim view of the sign, and pointed out that there was a law against private citizens ordering motorists to slow down. Besides, they said, the sign was too close to the road. Proprietor Patenaude pondered his next move all winter. Finally he came up with a solution which he hoped would satisfy everyone – a new, bigger sign on Route 169 but set farther back from the road. It read: WATCH OUT NUDISTS CROSSING AHEAD.
DRIVERS FILL UP WHILE GAS STATION ATTENDANT SLEEPS
When motorists drove into a gas station in Tortosa, Spain, and saw that the attendant had fallen asleep, they decided to fill up their cars free of charge and hurriedly phoned their friends urging them to do the same. The fuelling frenzy finished $1,000 worth of gas later when police grew suspicious after noticing an unusually long line of cars in front of the station. A police spokesman said: “Our officers went in and woke the man but by then a lot of people had come and gone. It was their lucky day.”
CONTRACTORS DEMOLISH WRONG HOUSE
A contractor hired to demolish a house in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 2001 accidentally knocked down the wrong one after a mix-up with city officials. On learning of the error, the contractor explained: “We were sitting on the street and we made a call to City Hall. We asked them if we were at the right house. They asked us if there were trees covering it up, and we said yes. They said: ‘Then you’re at the right place.’ Evidently there were two houses that were covered by trees.” Authorities confirmed that they were expecting a claim for compensation from the house owner.
CROATIAN SMURFS FEEL BLUE OVER RECORD
Eager to get the town’s name into The Guinness Book of World Records, the people of Komin, Croatia, searched for easy targets on the Internet. Discovering that the record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Smurfs was a modest 290 by an American group, they launched a determined campaign, set a date for the record attempt and informed the press. When the time came, 395 Smurfs descended on Komin – men, women and children all painted blue from head to toe, and wearing white trousers and white floppy hats. But when they contacted Guinness to verify the record, they were told that it had all been a waste of time. The Internet site they had consulted was out of date: the previous year, students at Warwick University in England had managed to assemble 451 Smurfs, beating the Croatian effort by 56. A dejected Croat spokesman said: “We could easily have got more Smurfs, but we thought that over a hundred more than the American record we found on the Internet would be enough.”
JOB APPLICATION UPSETS THE WELSH
An English student made the mistake of applying for a job a
t a Welsh tourist attraction using the email address “atleastimnotwelsh”. James Kettle, a student at Pershore Agricultural College, Worcestershire, also managed to send his application to the wrong address. Instead of sending it to the National Botanic Garden of Wales, he sent it to Aberglasney Gardens, Carmarthenshire, where a manager wrote back to him: “It may be prudent to change your email address. It could have a detrimental effect on any career aspirations of working in Wales.” Kettle admitted: “I feel a right fool. I set up the email at school because several Welsh kids were in my year. I forgot it was with my application.”
WRONG MAN APPEARS ON NORWEGIAN STAMP
The Norwegian postal service printed 1.3 million postage stamps in 2002 . . . featuring a picture of the wrong man. It had intended to honour noted Norwegian soccer referee Lars Johan Hammer but unwittingly used a picture of little-known German referee Peter Hertel instead. The postal service had been sold a picture from the 1997 junior Norwegian Cup, in which both men were officiating, but chose the wrong ref. To make matters worse, the two men did not look remotely alike. A disappointed Hammer said: “I was really looking forward to it and had alerted all my relations to the big event. I don’t have glasses or a beard and I must say I was stunned to see this strange referee on the stamps.”
The Mammoth Book of Weird News (Mammoth Books) Page 38