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Oops! The Silly Mistakes Thread

l was on a coach this afternoon, trying to log in to the bus company’s free wifi. No joy, but at one point, among a palette of other choices, l was offered the option of logging in to:

MI6 Surveillance Van”.

:oops:

True story.

maximus otter

In other words, a fellow passenger has set up their phone as a wifi hotspot and thought they'd use an amusing name. In the US they generally go for "FBI Surveillance Van".
 
I bet the Devil made them do it
Thousands petition Netflix to cancel Amazon Prime's Good Omens
US Christian group condemns Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s story as ‘making satanism appear normal’ – but petition wrong company
Alison Flood
Thu 20 Jun 2019 11.40 BSTLast modified on Thu 20 Jun 2019 16.00 BST

Crossed stations … Michael Sheen as Aziraphale and David Tennant as Crowley in Good Omens. Photograph: Chris Raphael/Amazon Prime

More than 20,000 Christians have signed a petition calling for the cancellation of Good Omens, the television series adapted from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 fantasy novel – unfortunately addressing their petition to Netflix when the series is made by Amazon Prime.
The six-part series was released last month, starring David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale, who collaborate to prevent the coming of the antichrist and an imminent apocalypse. Pratchett’s last request to Gaiman before he died was that he adapt the novel they wrote together; Gaiman wrote the screenplay and worked as showrunner on the BBC/Amazon co-production, which the Radio Times called “a devilishly funny love letter to the book”.

etc
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...Mn9q5YgDLnG-vEyvbuaqVzGEWk#Echobox=1561033276
 
All Netflix needs to do is post a message saying, "Yeah, OK, we've done it, it's cancelled." They'll never know.
 
From twitter:
ONE My dad died. Classic start to a funny story. He was buried in a small village in Sussex. I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot. I still do. [DON’T WORRY, IT GETS FUNNIER.]
  1. I always took flowers and my mum visited a lot and she always took flowers and my grandparents were still alive then and they always took flowers. My dad’s grave frequently resembled a solid third place at the Chelsea Flower Show.
  2. Nice but I felt bad for the guy buried next to my dad. He NEVER had flowers. Died on Christmas Day aged 37, no one left him flowers and now there’s a pop-up florist in the grave next door. So I started buying him flowers. I STARTED BUYING FLOWERS FOR A DECEASED MAN I’D NEVER MET.
  3. I did this for quite some time, but I never mentioned it to anyone. It was a little private joke with myself, I was making the world a better place one bunch of flowers at a time. I know it sounds weird but I came to think of him as a friend.
  4. I wondered if there was a hidden connection between us, something secretly drawing me to him. Maybe we went to the same school, played for the same football club or whatever. So I googled his name, and ten seconds later I found him.
  5. His wife didn’t leave him flowers BECAUSE HE’D MURDERED HER. ON CHRISTMAS DAY. After he murdered his wife, he murdered her parents too. And after that he jumped in front of the only train going through Balcombe tunnel that Christmas night.
  6. THAT was why no one ever left him flowers. No one except me, of course. I left him flowers. I left him flowers every couple of weeks. Every couple of weeks FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS.
  7. I felt terrible for his wife and her parents. Now, I wasn’t going to leave them flowers every couple of weeks for two and a half years but I did feel like I owed them some sort of apology.
  8. I found out where they were buried, bought flowers and drove to the cemetery. As I was standing at their graves mumbling apologies, a woman appeared behind me. She wanted to know who I was and why I was leaving flowers for her aunt and grandparents. AWKWARD.
  9. I explained and she said ok that’s weird but quite sweet. I said thanks, yes it is a bit weird and oh god I ASKED HER OUT FOR A DRINK. Incredibly, she said yes. Two years later she said yes again when I asked her to marry me because that is how I met my wife. [END]
 
From twitter:
ONE My dad died. Classic start to a funny story. He was buried in a small village in Sussex. I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot. I still do. [DON’T WORRY, IT GETS FUNNIER.]
  1. I always took flowers and my mum visited a lot and she always took flowers and my grandparents were still alive then and they always took flowers. My dad’s grave frequently resembled a solid third place at the Chelsea Flower Show.
  2. Nice but I felt bad for the guy buried next to my dad. He NEVER had flowers. Died on Christmas Day aged 37, no one left him flowers and now there’s a pop-up florist in the grave next door. So I started buying him flowers. I STARTED BUYING FLOWERS FOR A DECEASED MAN I’D NEVER MET.
  3. I did this for quite some time, but I never mentioned it to anyone. It was a little private joke with myself, I was making the world a better place one bunch of flowers at a time. I know it sounds weird but I came to think of him as a friend.
  4. I wondered if there was a hidden connection between us, something secretly drawing me to him. Maybe we went to the same school, played for the same football club or whatever. So I googled his name, and ten seconds later I found him.
  5. His wife didn’t leave him flowers BECAUSE HE’D MURDERED HER. ON CHRISTMAS DAY. After he murdered his wife, he murdered her parents too. And after that he jumped in front of the only train going through Balcombe tunnel that Christmas night.
  6. THAT was why no one ever left him flowers. No one except me, of course. I left him flowers. I left him flowers every couple of weeks. Every couple of weeks FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS.
  7. I felt terrible for his wife and her parents. Now, I wasn’t going to leave them flowers every couple of weeks for two and a half years but I did feel like I owed them some sort of apology.
  8. I found out where they were buried, bought flowers and drove to the cemetery. As I was standing at their graves mumbling apologies, a woman appeared behind me. She wanted to know who I was and why I was leaving flowers for her aunt and grandparents. AWKWARD.
  9. I explained and she said ok that’s weird but quite sweet. I said thanks, yes it is a bit weird and oh god I ASKED HER OUT FOR A DRINK. Incredibly, she said yes. Two years later she said yes again when I asked her to marry me because that is how I met my wife. [END]

That one became so viral it got a Snopes analysis!

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sixth-form-poet-wife/
 
Women arrested after reporting 'hitman' they hired to Spanish police

A Spanish woman and her daughter have been arrested after going to a police station to complain that the man they hired to carry out a murder had swindled them out of the €7,000 (£6,300) they paid him.

The incident seemed to begin earlier this month, when the pair told police in Madrid that the mother’s partner had cheated them out of a total of €60,000.

It later emerged the daughter’s partner, who claimed to be a senior member of Spain’s secret services, had suggested they recover the lost money by killing the mother’s boyfriend.

They paid him a €7,000 downpayment on the understanding he would arrange to have the mother’s boyfriend killed and sell the dead man’s organs to raise the €60,000.

When the killing failed to take place, the mother and daughter felt defrauded and went to the police again.

“Officers then proceeded to arrest the two women and set about tracing and arresting the male suspect,” Madrid police said in a statement. “They have not ruled out the possibility that he may have swindled other people.”

They said the three suspects were waiting to appear before a judge and that the victim of the plot had been found “in perfect health”.

Officers are looking into the background of the man and how he came to have false documents bearing the logo of the state intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Centre.

They also found a document in which he had allegedly laid out how he planned to carry out the killing and sell the victim’s organs.
 
On the wifi thing, I spoke to an infosec pro who would do talks in various cities around the world. To have some local material to work with, he would do a bit of war-biking first - essentially riding around whatever the nearest business and residential districts were, with a WiFi sniffer.

In San Francisco, he found a big apartment building where the residents were trolling each other with SSID names.

One said "Stop stealing our newspaper", another said "We don't even read it".

Another was complaining about the, eh, rather loud after hours activities of another couple in a nearby unit.
 
I got this from a list of murders where no body was found.

Malika Maria de Fernandez, The estranged wife of Peter Reyn-Bardt.

When the bog body later known as the Lindow Woman was found in a bog behind his home in 1983, police questioned Reyn-Bardt, whose wife had been missing for over two decades.

Reyn-Bardt, also believing that the partial body was that of his wife, admitted to have murdered her when she blackmailed him under threat of revealing his homosexuality. Afterward, he dismembered the body and buried the pieces in a trench leading to the bog.

Carbon 14 dating later showed that the body was nearly 1,800 years old. While Malika's own body was not found, the detailed confession was enough to pronounce her husband guilty.
 
That's one of the funniest colleague pranks you can play.

If they leave their computer unlocked -screenshot their desktop, hide all their icons in a folder somewhere, then replace their wallpaper with the screenshot.

If two people have desks facing each other with the monitors back-to-back, swap the monitor leads.
 
No... but I have been known to try and click buttons on a screenshot of a program and wonder why they aren't working...

At Lancaster railway station there's a laminated diagram next to the lift controls to explain how they work, and I always press the button on the picture.
 
Well, this sucks for the owner / driver of the Mercedes SUV .... Luckily, nobody was seriously hurt.
Driver leaving car wash hits gas, plunges into New Jersey river

A driver accidentally slammed on the gas while leaving a New Jersey car wash and plunged into a nearby river.

The Hackensack Fire Department shared surveillance camera footage showing the 2002 Mercedes SUV leaving the car wash, abruptly speeding up and plunging over an embankment into the Hackensack River.

The department said the driver, a 64-year-old woman, and a passenger, the driver's daughter, were able to exit the vehicle and get back to shore with the help of a bystander. The pair were taken to a local hospital without serious injuries.

"Unfortunately, there's no rules that say there has to be a guardrail there," Hackensack Fire Captain Justin Derevyanik told WABC-TV. "That's up to the property owner. ..."

FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2019/0...es-into-New-Jersey-river/6141563379173/?sl=14

VIDEO (@ Twitter):
 
Had plenty of time to use the brake.

My guess is that the driver (an older woman) leaned as she turned the vehicle, stabbed her foot onto the wrong pedal, and failed to correct the error in time. I've seen this many times with people driving vehicles with automatic transmissions.
 
Man with cerebral palsy in police stop & search for "looking spaced out"

A young writer with cerebral palsy, dyspraxia and a congenital left-sided weakness says he was humiliated when police handcuffed and searched him for looking “spaced out” and “walking with a limp”.

Hale was stopped and searched for “looking spaced”, “walking with a limp” and “looking to the sky”, according to a written record of the stop and search

Hale was walking around his neighbourhood in Camberwell, south London, on Sunday 7 July when a police car pulled over and two officers stopped and handcuffed him. “They asked me why I thought they were stopping me. I jokingly said: ‘Because I had a wonky eye,’ and the female officer who apprehended me said yes

The police took Hale’s wallet and phone and asked if he was on drugs, Hale said. “The assumption was that there is something criminally wrong with my body,” he said. “I felt like I didn’t meet a certain benchmark of what normality is.”

The police eventually took off the handcuffs and let Hale go. “They weren’t apologetic about it, they acknowledged it in a very brisk way. The female officer said we’d let you go because you’ve got a problem. And the other officer said these are things that have been going on since you were born. It just felt like you weren’t really a person. It was degrading.”

Simon Messinger, a borough commander with the Met, said: “Officers stopped a man on suspicion of possession of drugs in Southampton Street in Camberwell on Sunday 7 July and carried out a search. The gentleman in question made the officers aware that he had a disability affecting his movement. No drugs were found and he was then free to go on his way.”
 
Makes you wonder why they were frisking random people, who look funny, rather than preventing actual crimes.
They may have been acting on the results of a behaviour analysis system.
Video with AI that spots odd behaviour.
 
They may have been acting on the results of a behaviour analysis system.
Video with AI that spots odd behaviour.

Yes, but they are still human and had to interact with the guy suggesting that copper-training is getting worse.

I've worked a lot with the police and the vast majority of them have enough nouse to spot the difference between a disabled bloke and someone off their tits.
 
Man with cerebral palsy in police stop & search for "looking spaced out"

A young writer with cerebral palsy, dyspraxia and a congenital left-sided weakness says he was humiliated when police handcuffed and searched him for looking “spaced out” and “walking with a limp”.

An acquaintance with a spectacularly strange gait - due to some form of arthritis - used to stagger out of the pub and into his car and drive home, followed by the police car that had been discreetly parked across the road. He'd be stopped and breathalysed regularly to no avail, being teetotal. Being also a sport he took it as a big joke and would laugh throughout the proceedings.
 
I'm going to tell on my teen son here for a silly mistake (hey, if this didn't have a happy ending, I wouldn't, cos I'm not that terrible of a mother!).
Son just recently turned 18 so he is now able to sell lottery tickets at his job. Unfortunately, he misunderstood a customer's order and ended up printing $1000 more in tickets than the customer wanted. :eek:

Everyone he asked for advice - including the rep from the lottery commission - shrieked "A THOUSAND DOLLARS!?!" when he told them how much, so he figured he was done for.

The only way to get out of this without having to report the loss to the state was to sell all the tickets before a certain time, and by god, the kid did it. "I was hawking lottery tickets like my life depended on it" he said.

Since it worked out well, he now thinks it was an adventure, but I bet it won't happen again!:rollingw:
 
Everyone he asked for advice - including the rep from the lottery commission - shrieked "A THOUSAND DOLLARS!?!" when he told them how much, so he figured he was done for.

The only way to get out of this without having to report the loss to the state was to sell all the tickets before a certain time, and by god, the kid did it. "I was hawking lottery tickets like my life depended on it" he said.

I'd hope he also gets "Salesperson of the week" for that kind of effort.
 
An acquaintance with a spectacularly strange gait - due to some form of arthritis - used to stagger out of the pub and into his car and drive home, followed by the police car that had been discreetly parked across the road. He'd be stopped and breathalysed regularly to no avail, being teetotal. Being also a sport he took it as a big joke and would laugh throughout the proceedings.
And when he left everybody in the pub waited, then when the cop car followed him everybody ran to their cars
 
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