Cheapskates: In December, the 200 employees at SAS Shoemakers in Pittsfield, Mass., and the 270 workers at Stine Seed Co. in Adel, Iowa, were each given Christmas bonuses of $1,000 for every year of service to the company. In other bonus news, Tower Automotive of Traverse City, Mich., gave employees $15 Thanksgiving grocery gift cards, but then withheld $5.51 of that as federal and state income tax, and Air Canada gave coupons to 100 of its best-performing customer-service personnel, redeemable at restaurants owned by its in-flight food service contractor, worth C$5.00 (US$3.75).
More things to worry about: In December, Putnam County, N.Y., passed a law to further the aims of the federal Americans With Disabilities Act by permitting shoppers in wheelchairs to bring their service monkeys into stores to fetch items from shelves. (Legislator Sam Oliverio said he didn’t know of any service monkeys in use but wanted to be ready.) And in July, a ranch owner in San Diego County, Calif., was found not guilty of cruelty for disposing of 30,000 live, “nonproductive” hens by dumping them into a wood chipper, pointing out in defense that it was basically a “standard industry practice” endorsed by a member of the animal welfare committee of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Bright ideas: To fight two speeding tickets emanating from the same police camera in a 60km/hour zone, Carlos DeMarco, 39, went to the trouble of commandeering a 70km/hour sign and affixing it to the pole underneath that very speed camera, then photographing it to show that he was not speeding. In November, the judge in Parramatta, Australia, detected the clumsy nature of DeMarco’s work and fined him another A$1,000 on top of the A$246 in tickets (about US$880).
Toronto police arrested Walter Nowakowski, 35, in November on several pornography counts as well as theft of services after an officer spotted him driving the wrong way on a one-way street at 5 a.m. According to police, Nowakowski was pantless, with a laptop computer running in the front seat, as he drove slowly down streets in search of wireless Internet signals that he could use to download pornography.
Oops!: In October at the UPMC Presbyterian hospital in Oakland, Pa., a 35-year-old man having a kidney transplanted from his mother awoke prematurely from his anesthesia and bolted upright, which caused the just-sewn-in kidney to thrust up with such force that it ripped an artery and protruded from his abdomen. The kidney could no longer be used and was removed the next day.
Motorcyclist Steve Dass withdrew 72 $100 bills in October to take to his mother to pay for her new furniture, but he apparently forgot to zip up his jacket pocket, and all the money blew out along Highway 4 in Pittsburg, Calif. (A few finders returned the money.) But in Kalispell, Mont., in November, two men turned in a sack containing $14,600 they found lying in a bank parking lot; it was a pick-up from Wal-Mart that had been inexplicably dropped by Security Armored Express (which earlier this year was named as the best armored carrier in the country by Wal-Mart executives).
Pro football punter Chris Hanson played only one-third of the season this year because of a self-inflicted leg injury. His Jacksonville Jaguars coach had put a log and an ax in the locker room as a motivational symbol that the team needed to work hard in order to succeed. Hanson took a swing at the log, missed, and banged his leg so badly that he needed emergency surgery.
Least competent criminals: A two-week spree of five customer holdups in front of ATMs in Cambridge, Mass., came to an end in November with the arrest of Richard McCabe, 38. In four of the five robberies, bank security cameras photographed the perpetrator, and McCabe was apparently so disliked by so many that when police released the photos, more than 100 people called up to rat him out. Said a detective, “Many … people knew him personally from dealing with him in the past.”
2003 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2004.
