Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (37 page)

BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY

In 1947 Olga Frankevich and her sister fled from Soviet police during a purge of anti-Communist dissidents. The Frankeviches took up residence in a house in rural Ukraine. They were too afraid to come out…until 1992. Olga hid under the bed almost the entire time. Her sister moved about the house.

V
assar College
sends out acceptance e-mails to applicants around the world in lieu of the traditional postal letter. But in January 2012, 122 early-application hopefuls were informed by e-mail of their upcoming matriculation at the prestigious institution. Unfortunately, only 46 of those students had actually been accepted. Vassar’s computer system had set up a placeholder “test” acceptance e-mail, which, because of a computer error, was accidentally sent to everyone on the applicant list, regardless of their status.

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Cornell University
is an Ivy League school, so it’s hard to get into and hard to pay for. In 2009 somebody in the financial-aid office used the wrong mailing list and sent 25 already rejected applicants a letter telling them that they had been accepted and needed to fill out financial-aid paperwork.

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In 2007 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
sent a letter out to all 2,700-odd freshman applicants informing them of their acceptance. The college hadn’t even decided who it was going to accept yet.

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In 2009 the University of California San Diego,
sent welcome letters to 28,000 applicants who
had previously been told of their rejection and even included an invitation to a summer orientation weekend. A few hundred students and their families showed up, thinking the college had somehow reversed their rejections.

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The University of California, Los Angeles,
accepts thousands of freshmen, but also maintains a waiting list in case spots open up. In April 2012, the school’s admissions office emailed financial-aid updates to thousands of newly admitted students…as well as the 894 students on the waiting list. The letter concluded with the line, “Once again congratulations on your admission to UCLA,” which wasn’t true, along with a link to their financial-aid profile, clearly marked “waiting list.” Confused students were issued an apology two days later.

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The Diversity Visa Program (also called the Green Card Lottery)
issues 50,000 visas annually to people from nations with low U.S. immigration rates, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. Around 13 million people apply for the program annually, requiring a lottery, conducted at random by computer. In 2011, 22,000 applicants were selected too early in the process, and received “Welcome to America!” letters…before the State Department had to apologize and backtrack.

I
n November 1995, farmer Lowell Altvater, 80, of Sandusky, Ohio, saw a rat in his barn and fired his shotgun at it. Except it wasn’t a rat—it was his wife’s hat. And she was wearing it at the time. She was behind a divider wall in the barn, and Mr. Altvater, seeing only the hat above it, mistook it for a rat scurrying along the top of the wall. Mrs. Altvater was not hurt, but her husband was charged with negligent assault anyway, partly, police said, because just a few years earlier Mr. Altvater had shot himself in the leg in the same barn…while trying to shoot a rat.

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In October 2011, John Watkyn-James, 51, was driving his tractor down a rural road in the south of Wales, towing a metal work trailer roughly 10 feet long, when he parked on the road near one of his pastures to feed some horses. Big no-no: He parked with the trailer straddling a train track. Less than a minute later a high-speed passenger train hit the trailer at roughly 75 mph. The trailer was smashed to bits, and the nose of the train was heavily damaged, but, very fortunately, the train did not derail, and nobody was hurt. Watkyn-James was, however, charged with “endangering the safety of persons using the railway,” and was
ordered to perform 200 hours of community service. He was also told by the judge that he was “incredibly stupid.”

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In November 2012, a farmer on the outskirts of Billings, Montana, was driving a combine harvester through his cornfield when he felt a “shudder” go through the machine. He shut the harvester off and, in what could have been a scene from a horror film, found a screaming man caught up in the machine’s giant cylinder of blades. When emergency medical technicians finally arrived, they had to manually reverse the blades to get the man out. Amazingly, he was pretty much okay: He needed lots of stitches, but none of his injuries were life-threatening. How did the guy end up in the harvester? The 57-year-old, who police said they would not be identifying, told officers that he’d been walking down a nearby road when he’d gotten tired…and decided to lie down in the cornfield. He fell asleep—and the combine had driven right over him, snagging him by his clothes and pulling him up into the blades. “The man is incredibly lucky to be alive,” Sheriff Kent O’Donnell said. “And that’s about all you can say about that.”

T
here was an error in the Dear Abby column that was published on Monday. In the fifth paragraph, the second sentence stated that Charlie’s hiccups were cured temporarily through the use of carbon monoxide. It should have read carbon dioxide.”

—
Anchorage Daily News

“In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s
Lake Wobegon Days
, we referred to
A Prairie Ho Companion
; we meant
A Prairie Home Companion
.”

—
The Guardian (U.K.)

“In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to ‘shoot guns and blow things up.’ ”

—
The Sentinel-Review

(Woodstock, Ontario, Canada)

“An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Buffington’s special support hose as ‘mercury-lined.’ The hose are mercury-gauged, meaning that barometric mercury is used to measure the compression of the hose. They are not mercury-lined, which would, of course, make them poisonous.”

—
The Sunday Paper
(Atlanta, Georgia)

“In our feature ‘Why She Left Him,’ the woman identified in the photograph as former adult-film star Ginger Lynn Allen is neither Ms. Allen nor an adult-film actress.
US
regrets the error.”

—
US Weekly

“A story on Wednesday about foraging for edible mushrooms contained a photo of
Amanita muscaria
, which is a poisonous and hallucinogenic mushroom. It was a copyeditor’s error.”

—
Portland
(Maine)
Press Herald

“We misspelled the word ‘misspelled’ twice, as ‘mispelled,’ in the Corrections and Clarifications column on September 26, page 30.”

—
The Guardian

A
thlete:
Thomas Hamilton-Brown

Event:
Boxing, lightweight division

Story:
At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, South African boxer Hamilton-Brown lost his first-round fight to Chile’s Carlos Lillo in a split decision, and he was out of the Games. But a couple of days later, Olympic officials announced that the judges had made a scoring error—and that Hamilton-Brown was the winner of the fight. However, after his loss, Hamilton-Brown had consoled himself with an eating binge. When it came time to fight his next match—the one he didn’t think was coming—he was five pounds over his weight-class limit. Hamilton-Brown was disqualified.

Athlete:
Siegfried “Wim” Esajas

Event:
800-meter run

Story:
At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Esajas became the first athlete from Suriname to compete in the Olympics. Or he would have been. Esajas overslept on the day of his qualifying heat and missed the race. It turns out the blunder wasn’t his fault. Suriname’s Olympic Committee later admitted that its secretary-general, Fred Glans, had incorrectly told Esajas that his race had been rescheduled from the morning to the afternoon.