The city of New York had trouble with another employee. This one, his bosses claimed, abandoned his job when he missed 18 months of work. An administrative law judge even recommended firing the slacker when he didn’t bother to show up for his hearing. Turns out, the employee would have loved to have gone to work—even to the hearing—save for one small detail: He was dead. —rawstory.com. You won’t believe these really dumb things that smart people did.
A San Francisco couple got quite the surprise when they returned home from the Burning Man Festival last September—the house sitter they’d hired had rented out their apartment on Airbnb. —seattlepi.com
An Egyptian bus driver had an ingenious plan to beat a mandatory drug test: He used his wife’s urine. Nevertheless, he failed the test. He found out when his boss handed him the results and reportedly said, “Congratulations; you’re pregnant.” —BBC News
New York City’s Department of Health may have a job opening soon if one of its employees doesn’t stop screwing around. It seems that management does not care for the fact that the twice-suspended help-line operator keeps answering IT calls by talking like a robot. —New York. These are the most ridiculous excuses people actually used to get out of work.
(NEWSER) – A real woman tried to hire a hitman on a fake website. Wendy Lynn Wein, 52, found Rent-A-Hitman online and filled out a form asking for help killing her ex-husband. Unfortunately for Wein and perhaps fortunately for her ex, that site is owned not by a hitman but computer professional Bob Innes who initially launched it in 2005 to promote a hacking prevention business. Years later he started checking the site’s inbox and found a lot of disturbing requests not related to that business. Since then, he’s made the site into an obvious joke, and, when he gets requests, he turns them over to police, KPIX reports.
That’s what he did with Wein, who used a pseudonym but her otherwise real contact information. Wein put in her service request on the site that her ex had stolen $20,000 from her, and said she didn’t want to commit the crime herself. “I prefer not going to jail,” she wrote, per the Daily Mail. Innes forwarded that to Michigan State Police, who posed as people affiliated with the site to contact Wein. She gave a detective her ex’s address and told them when and where he works, and a $200 down payment on the $5,000 tab for the murder. They charged her, and she pleaded guilty Friday and could serve up to 9 years in prison, FOX2 reports.
(NEWSER) – Police in Delaware say a man who robbed a Wilmington bank on Saturday didn’t keep the cash for long—after fleeing the Wells Fargo branch, he paused to make a deposit in the ATM outside. Police say McRoberts Williams, a 44-year-old California resident, handed a note to a teller Saturday morning saying a robbery was taking place, WBZ reports. The 25-year-old woman gave him an undisclosed amount of cash.
Williams fled on foot and made the deposit in a machine on the exterior of the building, Delaware State Police said. Officers responding to the scene found him behind a nearby shopping center and took him into custody without incident. He was charged with second-degree robbery, a felony, with bond set at $6,000.
(NEWSER) – The California Highway Patrol chased a stolen party bus across southern California Tuesday before it slammed into a sedan north of Los Angeles. Top Dog Limo Bus owner Susie Leitzke tells KTLA that the 40-foot vehicle was stolen in San Diego Tuesday morning when a person jumped in while the driver was doing a pickup. She says local cops searched for it until around 90 minutes later, when she received a call from somebody on the 405 Freeway who complained that somebody in one of the company’s vehicles was “driving crazy on the freeway and doing 90mph.”
“I explained to him that was a stolen bus and he stayed on the phone until we called dispatch and got somebody out there,” Leitzke says. Police say the driver continued speeding during a pursuit on freeways through Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and Santa Clarita before they exited the freeway in Palmdale and hit a silver four-door car minutes later, Fox 11 reports. There were no immediate reports of injuries, but the vehicle was heavily damaged. Patrol units surrounded the bus and a woman exited the vehicle and was taken into custody at gunpoint, reports the Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
(NEWSER) – A man in Oklahoma apparently had his heart set on an Audi, but his alleged scheme to acquire one didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. KTUL reports that Randy Cantwell was arrested in Tulsa after police say he showed up at a car dealership in Tulsa, claimed he was a federal marshal, and tried to drive away in one of the lot’s vehicles. According to the Tulsa Police Department, Cantwell arrived at the dealership in the south part of the city on Monday and expressed interest in an Audi there, per employee accounts. With keys in hand, a worker reportedly took Cantwell over to see the car, though he explained Cantwell couldn’t actually take it for a spin because the vehicle wasn’t prepped to drive.
That’s when things took a weird turn. Cops say Cantwell told the employee the car was stolen, that he was a federal marshal, and that he was leaving with the car. Quick-thinking workers say they blocked him in, however, forcing Cantwell to ditch the car and try to walk off the lot. Police arrived at the scene, and they say the only ID Cantwell provided was a driver’s license—meaning it didn’t appear he was a federal marshal after all, despite him telling officers he became one after Donald Trump declared martial law while president, per FOX23. Cantwell was arrested for false impersonation of law enforcement.
(NEWSER) – Two Alabama men have been arrested over an audacious, but extremely ill-advised, theft. The Russell County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post Tuesday that Gabriel Mendoza Garcia and Steve Gerome Spann were arrested Monday for allegedly stealing a speed-warning trailer that belongs to the sheriff’s office. “It appears they were trying to get the batteries to sell the batteries,” Sheriff Heath Taylor tells the Ledger-Enquirer. “Batteries are bringing a high dollar now.”
Both men have been charged with first-degree theft of property and first-degree criminal mischief. Taylor says the suspects were tracked down through the trailer’s GPS. WRBL reports that the trailer is also equipped with a camera, which captured video of the theft. “It just shows you we’ve got crazy people running around,” the sheriff says.
A Florida high school was evacuated Thursday after “bong” was misheard as “bomb.”
A family member of a student at Marianna High School called a staff member and said the student had a “bong” in their backpack, School Superintendent H. Larry Moore said in an online statement.
Persecution Live 