Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 (23 page)

The Peter Principle dictates that in business, people will rise to their level of incompetence. Our corollary to this principle is simply this: often, people don't have to rise very high to reach it. Heck, sometimes, they don't even need to get themselves into a sitting position. Lawyers, doctors, people who just have really intense attachments to their office supplies—every day, in every way, there's someone lowering the dumbness bar in the workplace.

 

T
his is not your traditional story of stupidity,
to be sure, but it does say
something
about the psychology of contemporary man: a branch of Barclay's Bank in Croydon, south London, apparently wanted to gauge how much attention passers-by were paying to the advertisements in its windows. So in January 2004, the bank put up a sign in the window, inviting people to come on in and receive £5 (about $9) just for popping through the door.

Now, at this point, you may be expecting to read how the bank branch was mobbed by Britons and then perhaps how riots ensued when the bank eventually ran out.

But actually, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, nothing of
any
sort happened. And that's because in two hours that the bank had the sign in the shop, the exact number of people who popped through the door saying “Hello! I'd like my money, please!” was precisely zero. The bank literally could not give away free money. The bank chalked it up to a combination of people not reading the advertisements in the bank window, and, alternately, simply not believing that a bank would actually give money away. Expectations are more important in some cases than reality.

Incidentally, all you Londoners now planning to cruise the Croydon Barclays for your free cash can forget it. The bank spokeswoman stressed this was a one-time experiment. You missed your free money! Now don't you feel silly.

Source: BBC

 

S
ome lawyers are known for their sartorial acumen
and well-nigh metrosexual attention to matters of grooming, because nothing says “trust me” to a jury like a $4,000 suit and fingernails buffed to a fare-thee-well. But we think we're not alone in the belief that while it's perfectly acceptable if a lawyer wants to blow your $300-an-hour fee on fine Italian tailoring and pedicures, it's probably best if he or she takes care of that business outside of the courtroom.

Someone needed to tell that to “Jorma,” a Finnish prosecutor working on a financial crime trial. While everyone else in the courtroom was busy working under the impression that they were, you know, in
a court of law
, he looked down at his nails and decided that what he really needed to do right that moment was give them a nice trim. And so he clipped his nails back to what he thought was an appropriate length in a rather inappropriate venue.

It's easy to see why such an action would not be appreciated. Aside from violating the polite fiction that the officers of the court are actually paying attention to the proceedings at least some of the time, we'd be betting the sharp metallic
ping
that emanates from each nail clipping can get really annoying when someone else is trying to lay down evidence. Plus it would be a real shame to catch some nail clipping shrapnel during opening statements.

How did he follow up clipping his nails? By looking at the back of his hands, deciding they were just
too
hairy, and beginning to trim those back, too. And here we go from being merely hygienically zealous to being entirely and totally gross.

Eventually the court has enough and reprimanded the prosecutor (who, it was rumored, had done trimmings in other cases as well). For a punishment, we'd suggest forcing the fellow to bite his own nails. The horror. The horror.

Source: Aftenposten

 

T
here are some sentences you just don't want to hear
from your emergency medical technician while you're traveling to a hospital in an ambulance. From the obvious (“Oh, that's gotta hurt!”) to the oblivious (“Wow, I always thought the spleen was on the other side of the body”), there are plenty of comments an ambulance passenger would be better off
not
hearing. But just what would happen if a traumatized ambulance patient heard the following request: “Uh, can we, like, borrow some money for gas?”

That sentence, or one close to it, came out of the lips of the EMT transporting Julia Paul, who had gone into premature labor, and her partner Chris Boag. The two were being taken from a hospital in Essex, UK, to a facility that could accommodate the premature delivery. It was a long trip—130 miles or so. Along the way the ambulance ran low on gas and stopped to refuel. In an embarrassing moment to say the least, the ambulance driver's company credit card was refused by the gas station. So the driver did the only thing he could—ask Boag if he could cough up some cash. Boag scraped up £40 (a bit over $60) before they could all be on their way.

Interestingly, the fuel-starved ambulance was actually the
second
ambulance called to transport the mom-to-be and her partner; the first developed a flat tire. It's no wonder that the British government eventually investigated this ambulance company for its attempt to pass on its transportation costs directly to the patient.

What does this tell us? One, don't go into premature labor in Essex. Two, if you
do,
make sure you've got some spare cash on you. Just in case. By the way—the baby (a girl!) and the mother were doing just fine after the birth. So at least
that
worked out well.

Source:
The Sun
(UK),
The Guardian
(UK)

 

P
arched? Thirsty?
Choking on a cracker and need something to wash it down? You'll want to avoid Atlantic Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, in the United Kingdom. For if you go there, they will refuse to serve water from the tap. It's either expensive bottled water for you—or you can drink nothing.

So learned one customer of the Atlantic Hotel's restaurant in February 2004. Mrs. Sally Burchell had gone to luncheon there for £18.50 a pop (about $30 U.S.) with about fifty other people. During the course of the meal she felt the need for simple hydration and asked a member of the staff for some tap water, which in most parts of the civilized world comes for free. She was refused and was told she could either shell out 80 pence (about $1.25) for a small bottle of water or £2 ($3.20) for a liter of the stuff. Mrs. Burchell thought this was mildly outrageous and wrote a complaint letter about it to the hotel manager.

The hotel manager, by the name of Anthony Cobley, wrote back, not to express his condolences to a disgruntled customer but to “enlighten you about the workings of the modern world.” He detailed that in the modern world, there's no such thing as a free glass of water. Let's let his words do the talking, shall we?

“I buy water from the South West Water company. I buy the glasses that the water is served in. I buy the ice that goes into the water and I buy the labour to serve the water.

“I provide the luxury surroundings for the water to be drunk in and again pay for the labour and washing materials to wash the glass after you have used it, and you think that I should provide all of this free of charge!

“As regards your comment that you will not be returning to the Atlantic Hotel ever again, leaves me to say that customers who only drink water and complain about paying for it, I can certainly do without.”

That's
customer service?

Incidentally, according to the BBC, “The actual cost of a litre of tap water is less than a ten thousandth of a penny according to South West Water.” So charging £2 for a liter is something like a 20,000 percent markup. Which even for a place proving “luxury surroundings” does seem to be a little steep.

Cobley may have saved some infinitesimal fraction of a pence in not providing his customer with a glass of water, but his letter of unrepentant tightwaddedness showed up in media outlets all over the world, from the BBC to, well, this very book. One can imagine the negative impact on Cobley's business. So in the interest of enlightening future hotel managers of the world to the workings of the modern world: when someone asks for some water, get it for them, already. And
smile.

Source: Ananova, BBC

 

N
ow, admittedly,
these days so many former high-ranking business executives are being frog-marched into jail, it's getting harder and harder to find an exec who isn't an ex-con. To be clear, let's admit there's a difference between the guy who maybe screwed up as a youth and went to the slammer, and then cleaned up his life, and the guys who get to the executive suite and then think of new and exciting ways to obfuscate the corporate accounting, The latter are jerks; the former may be worthy of having some slack cut for them. Be that as it may, it's best that the executives and board members not have criminal records that reflect poorly on the company or its product. So one might not wish to have a former drug dealer as chairman of a pharmaceutical company, or an alcoholic minding the still.

Not that something like that could ever happen, you say? Meet James Joseph Minder, who was for a brief time in 2004 the chairman of the board for Smith & Wesson, America's second-largest gun company, famous for its handguns and its close association to law enforcement. His brief time as chairman probably had something to do with a little story the
Arizona Republic
newspaper ran about him. It turns out that Minder had spent fifteen years in prison for armed robbery, while he was a student at the University of Michigan in the 1950s.

To be fair to Minder, after he was finally sprung from prison in 1969, he led an exemplary public life and had run a nonprofit agency to help troubled and disabled Michigan teens for two decades. So once he put that armed robbery thing
behind him, he turned out to have been rehabilitated just fine. Sometimes the system does work well enough for a former (and reformed) armed robber to lead a gun company.

In an era where applicants for janitorial and executive assistant positions are scrutinized with invasive background checks, how does someone with several armed robberies in his history slip by? Minder's answer is instructive: “Nobody asked.” Indeed. Time for some background checks in board-rooms, we say. We imagine the janitors and assistants cheering. Quietly.

Source: Ananova,
USA Today,
CNNMoney.com

 

I
t's not the credit card application that was unusual.
It was pretty much the same as most other offers that promise pre-approval, low-monthly interest, and all that jazz.

What was unusual was that the recipient, one Miss Abi McDermott Knott of Leeds, England, was thirteen months old at the time she received it. Which, even by the rather lax standards of credit card issuers today, seems a
little
premature. After all, that's hardly enough time to build a credit history, now, is it? What has she really bought with her own money? Not a whit.

Babies—cute though they are and necessary for the survival of the species—are totally financial freeloaders. Other people spring for their food, their shelter, and the clothes. No matter how you look at them, babies are just a bad credit risk. Have one if you want—have two, they're small—but banks' issuing them credit cards is just not good policy.

Which Ian Barber, the appropriately apologetic spokesman for Barclaycard, the credit card issuer in question, readily admitted, “There's absolutely no way that she would have been issued with a card,” he said. Of course, that's easy to say after the baby turned down the offer. Or so mother Shelley Roberts claims: “I asked her if she wanted to apply but she didn't seem too interested, oddly enough.”

Source: BBC,
Sydney Morning Herald

 

F
uneral directors are busy,
what with people dying all the time. Still, we thought we'd pass along a small piece of advice (that really should go without saying). Before sending a coffin off to be buried in the cemetery, do the nice thing and make sure it's the right one. A case of mistaken identity is no picnic for an undertaker. And of course, it's difficult for the family of the deceased as well.