Beyond Beyond the Fringe category archive

Dry gulched:

Wireman, a Department of Public Utilities employee, was injured May 28 outside Cirillo’s home, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in Circuit Court. She was disconnecting a plastic pipe that had been jury-rigged to let the house connect to city water without a meter. The pipe was rigged with two batteries to cause harm, the affidavit said.

If found guilty of malicious wounding, he might not have another water bill for two decades.

You can’t make this stuff up.

One stark example (warning: language):

Oh, my.

The man entered the Subway with his family about 7:45 p.m. in the 7400 block of 42nd Avenue Southwest, according to Seattle police reports. While workers took the family’s order, the man entered the bathroom and didn’t leave. His wife knocked on the door and asked him why he was taking so long, police say.

The family left the Subway without him.

The man then exited the restroom carrying a plastic garbage bag and hustled out of the restaurant, reports say.

An employee checked the bathroom and found the toilet tank gone . . . .

This story nagged at me all day yesterday (more detail at the link, emphasis added).

A Bayside High teacher was forced to strip while a school nurse checked for scabies in December 2012, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Monday.

Donika Anderson-Wagner was pulled out of her classroom on Dec. 14, 2012, after a parent told a school employee that one of Anderson-Wagner’s students had contracted the skin-burrowing mites, according to the lawsuit.

The disease is spread by prolonged skin-to-skin contact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The school employee sent an email to Assistant Principal Bermina Nickerson at noon that day saying the student indicated the scabies came from her teacher.

Bayside High School is just up the road a piece.

Natch, no evidence of infection on the part of the teacher was found, but she was still humiliated by her employer for no good reason. Why a doctor’s note would not have been sufficient baffles me.

My mother was a teacher (if you want your own version of hell, trying having your mother as your Algebra II teacher, but that’s another story) and my Ex was a school nurse. The principal of my high school was in the same bridge club as my parents (in fact, when my mother passed away, he was at the funeral–the last living member of that bridge club). I know a little bit about how schools (at least used to) work.

I cannot fathom a school administration demeaning a teacher in such a manner (I do have a theory–kudos to anyone who can figure it out in the comments). The best I can make of it is that management went off half-cocked, deciding to humiliate a member of the staff on the contents of a questionable-at-best email.

If you want bad performance from your staff, one sure way to get it is to treat your employees like dirt.

Via Sampler, an image site (some images NSFW).

Warning: Worst taste than usual.

This is just strange.

For the second time in three years, Mazda Motor Corp has issued a recall for Mazda6 sedans in North America because of a spider that likes the smell of gasoline and weaves a web that blocks a vent in the engine.

Mazda told U.S. regulators that it is recalling 42,000 sedans with 2.5-liter engines from model years 2010 to 2012 in the United States. Mazda officials were not immediately available to report recalls outside of the United States.

(snip)

In 2011, Reuters reported that the Yellow Sac spider was the culprit in that year’s recall. It just likes the smell of gasoline, an auto analyst told Reuters at the time.

At the Big Box Store.

Beware the courtesy cops.

Isaiah Morris, 20, told cops that he and a friend were “sitting in a booth eating” Sunday afternoon when an unknown white male asked if he “had just belched and not said excuse me,” according to a Tega Cay Police Department report.

When Morris (seen at right) asked the man what he had said, the attacker picked up a chair and struck Morris in the elbow. Morris said that the man then grabbed him by the throat and tried to head-butt him. At that point, Cara Martin, a 17-year-old Taco Bell worker, interceded and ordered the man to leave the restaurant.

More “you can’t make this stuff up.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Sprint Corp. for charging the government $21 million more than it was entitled to for helping federal agents tap the phones of Sprint customers.

Warning: Language and bad taste.

Ferrelly, ferrelly, he doth foment frolicking frolickers.

Emphasis added.

A military veteran on a weekend getaway with his wife faces three years in a Canadian prison after his GPS mistakenly led him to the Thousand Islands Bridge border crossing in upstate New York.

Louis DiNatale, a retired Army sergeant major, told the Los Angeles Times that he hadn’t planned on entering Canada, but was “misdirected by an unreliable GPS.” He asked if he could turn around, but Canadian border patrol agents refused to allow him to.

The agents ultimately searched his car, found a pistol in the center console, and arrested him for smuggling.

Sounds like the agents may have overreached to me, but it also sounds as if he might have been an eensy-weensy bit high-handed, a tactic that does not win friends, but which does, indeed, influence people.

Also, he clearly wasn’t paying attention to the road or he would have seen the signs. Canada’s kind of big not to notice.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Police track down masked robber by tracking down the mask:

Based on information received from an anonymous tip, along with surveillance photos and interviews, investigators learned that the mask worn by the suspect had been ordered from a special effects mask-making company located in Seabrook, N.H. Known as a “RAJ” mask, it was one of only about 17 made-to-order masks the company had manufactured.

The moral: Don’t use a Lamborghini as a getaway car. There aren’t many of them and they tend to get noticed.

Via The Flying Cat (Warning: Definitely NSFW).

You can’t make this stuff up.

Jess and Dave Osinski enjoy sharing vacation photos on Facebook. Clearly, one of their few hundred “friends” wishes they would stop.

The Wauwatosa couple received an anonymous letter in the mail this month.

“It’s a little upsetting seeing, hearing and reading about someone’s vacations all year while we all can’t afford one,” it said.

The letter went on to tell them to stop being so selfish and have some kids.

More frolics at the link.