Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (27 page)

DO NOT TOUCH, DO NOT LOOK

Like Mr. Gallagher in the item above, Michael Ireland was celebrating his bachelor party at a strip joint, this one the Cheetah in West Palm Beach, Florida, in September 2008. At one point during the festivities, he was watching dancer Sakeena Shageer perform atop the club’s bar. Shageer wasn’t paying much attention to where she was gyrating, and one of her stiletto heels ended up in one of Ireland’s eye sockets. He suffered a broken
orbital bone, a broken nose, and possibly permanently impaired vision. He sued the club, and the Cheetah eventually settled the case for $650,000. However, Shageer’s take on the story is a little different. She claims that while she was dancing with her back turned to Ireland, he spanked her, hard. As the club has a strict “no touching” policy, Shageer says that she instantly and instinctively reacted by kicking out her foot. “I didn’t mean to mess up his face like that,” she said.

STRIPPER WAR

In October 2012, two strippers got into a fight at Hot Bodies, an Austin, Texas, strip club. Then another joined in…and yet another…and BAM!—it was a full-on bench-clearing stripper brawl. In the middle of the melee, stripper Victoria Perez took off one of her high-heeled shoes and winged it across the room. In a repeat of the Michael Ireland story almost too exact to be true, the heel of that shoe went right into an eye socket of an unidentified Hot Bodies patron. When police arrived minutes later, they found 17 strippers in a full-tilt rumble—and the unidentified man wailing and holding his hands over his bloody face. He was taken to the hospital and, fortunately, released that night—but doctors said the man might eventually lose his eye. Perez, who police officers said was caught on security footage throwing the shoe, told them it “may have been” her who did it. She was arrested on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—the high-heeled shoe—and jailed on $50,000 bail.

FROM COPPING A FEEL TO COPPING A PLEA

In July 2012, Wendy Haddon of Humpty Doo, Australia (really), was treated by her friends to a “hen’s night,” the Australian equivalent of a bachelorette party, at the Humpty Doo Hotel’s bar. Hours into the party, two carloads of men in police uniforms pulled into the parking lot, and the drunken gals ran outside shouting, “Here come the strippers! Here come the strippers!” But they weren’t strippers dressed like cops—they were actual cops. Senior Sergeant Louise Jorgensen told reporters the next day, “Someone approached the officers about taking their clothes off. They weren’t willing to do that.” She added that the two officers “nearly had their shirts taken off, but they managed to escape with their dignity intact.” Bride-to-be Haddon spoke to reporters, too, saying, “We thought they were going to be strippers. But, no, they weren’t. Bugger.”

The cops actually took the mistake in fun, and even posed for pictures with Haddon. One of the photos showed an officer pretending to arrest Haddon—standing behind her as he bent her over the hood of his police car.

D
o right by yourself, your teammates, and your club.” That was the friendly advice the Barossa, South Australia, police department posted on its Facebook page ahead of the annual end-of-season celebrations for Australian rules football teams. Many players failed to heed that advice.

The five worst offenders were from the Tanunda team. They were partying at a hotel when one of them had an epiphany: It would be easier to slide butt-first down the hallway if there were some sort of slippery substance on the floor. So he broke into a supplies closet, grabbed a bottle of floor polish, and poured it all over the floor.

Then they all slid down the hallway. Whee!

Then their buttocks all started burning. Badly. The footballers started screaming as they tried to wipe off their rears, but that just made it worse. It turned out that the inebriated footballer had unwittingly snatched an industrial cleaner chockfull of hazardous acid-based chemicals that burn skin on contact. Ouch.

B
loody informative.
British Aircraft Corporation made an in-house training film in 1976 to instruct its factory workers on the importance of wearing protective goggles. However, the film was of the “if you don’t do this, this will happen variety,” meaning it included graphic depictions of on-the-job eye gougings, losses, and injuries. One worker fainted as he fell off his chair, opening a gash in his head that required stitches.

What a card!
In 1938, about two years after Social Security debuted, a wallet manufacturer in Lockport, New York, put mock Social Security cards in its wallets (similar to the fake pictures used today). But the company didn’t put a fake number on them—they used 078-05-1120, the number of the company’s secretary. It was half the size of an actual Social Security card and stamped “specimen” in red ink, but hundreds of people still assumed for some reason that it was a real card,
their
card, and that that was their number. It wasn’t fully straightened out until the 1970s.

Yo quiero basura!
Taco Bell’s most famous ad campaign involved a talking Chihuahua going up to people on the street and saying, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” It was the ’90s most famous fast food catchphrase, the “Where’s the beef?” of its time. The ad campaign lasted from 1997 to 2000, when it was yanked off the air after Taco Bell discovered that its sales had actually
dropped
by 6 percent since the introduction of the Spanish-speaking dog mascot. Some fast-food industry analysts think it’s because people don’t want to see themselves as the kind of people who eat what dogs eat: Dogs eat literally anything, including garbage. Even worse: In 2003 two men sued Taco Bell, claiming they had pitched a “talking Chihuahua ad campaign” six years earlier, and that Taco Bell rejected it, but then ran it anyway without paying the men anything. The advertisers won the suit, and Taco Bell had to pay them $42 million.

D’oh!
In 1993 the U.S. Postal Service released its most popular commemorative postage stamp ever: the one featuring a young Elvis Presley (which won out over an older Elvis in a national poll). The USPS sold out its run of 517 million of the 29-cent stamps. In 2009, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of
The Simpsons
debut on Fox, the Postal Service debuted a line of five Simpsons stamps, one for each member of the Simpson nuclear family. The agency printed a staggering one billion 44-cent Simpsons stamps in all, twice that of the Elvis run. How many did they ultimately sell? Not even as many as Elvis. Only 318 million stamps were sold. In 2012 the USPS raised the rate (and standard stamp value) to 45 cents, rendering the 682 million unsold Simpsons stamps in need of
an additional one-cent stamp to mail a letter. The USPS pulped them, a waste of $1.2 million in printing costs, not to mention the $286 million retail value of the unsold postage. This debacle is just a drop in the bucket for the USPS’s woes: It lost $15 billion in fiscal 2012 and was even considering dropping national Saturday mail delivery. Overall, fewer people are using first-class stamps to mail letters, opting instead for email and other forms of electronic communication—especially young people, the target demographic for the Simpsons stamps.

Royally dumb.
Legend has it that in 1934 Cunard Cruise Line planned to name its gigantic new flagship ocean liner the
Queen Victoria
, after the deceased British monarch. The company thought it might be a good idea to seek approval from the current monarch, King George V. Cunard director Thomas Royden asked King George for his blessing to name the ship “after the greatest queen this country has ever known.” The king replied, “That is the greatest compliment ever paid to my wife. I’ll ask her.” And so, the
Queen Mary
was named.