Last month, United personnel once again stuck their foot in it when they first refused to provide hot food to an autistic teen, although they finally relented.
The girl was fine, but the idiot pilot called for an emergency landing, called the paramedics and the cops.
When the officers started to leave, the captain stepped out of the cockpit and said something to them, Beegle said. They then asked her family to leave, she said.
“He said, ‘The captain has asked us to ask you to step off the plane.'” Beegle said. “I said, ‘She didn’t do anything’ … But the captain said he’s not comfortable flying on to Portland with [Juliette] on the plane.”
All of this with the full support of management.
United said its “crew made the best decision for the safety and comfort of all of our customers and elected to divert to Salt Lake City after the situation became disruptive.”
Passengers who witnessed the whole thing and posted videos said it was total bunk.
Of course, what UAL did to this child was far worse than breaking a guitar, but it goes to show their motto is still “the customer is always wrong, no matter what.”
I now believe the SMIAs have achieved Darwin Award status.
For the innocents among you, Darwins are given posthumously to people for removing themselves from the gene pool, i.e., their death is the result of their own overwhelming stupidity, such as the couple that went past a barrier set up to keep people off the cliff edge at Cabo de Roca and slipped while trying to take a selfie—and did it in front of their kids.
Here are other recent entrants.
Last week a man in Mexico was taking a selfie when he accidentally shot himself in the head. Others have sustained injuries while taking selfies: A man was trampled by a bull in France while trying to take a photo in front of it, and a reporter was nearly hit in the head by a stray baseball while snapping a photo of herself.
Culture and societal norms change.
Starting in the Elizabethan era people longed to be a “nine days’ wonder.”
Since the Sixties people hoped for “15 minutes of fame.”
These days they are willing to die for 15 seconds of social media fame.
But having read the latest I have to revise what I said.
In addition to bad judgment, think gross stupidity.
I suppose I should say “alleged,” but the evidence leaves little doubt regarding just how stupid these bosses were.
Consider the smoking emails between Steven Davis, Dewey’s former chairman; Stephen DiCarmine, the firm’s former executive director; Joel Sanders, the former chief financial officer; and Zachary Warren, a former client relations manager.
Four men, who were charged by New York prosecutors on Thursday with orchestrating a nearly four-year scheme to manipulate the firm’s books to keep it afloat during the financial crisis, talked openly in emails about “fake income,” “accounting tricks” and their ability to fool the firm’s “clueless auditor,” the prosecutors said. (…) One of the men even used the phrase “cooking the books” to describe what they were doing to mislead the firm’s lenders and creditors in setting the stage for a $150 million debt offering…
And ignorance isn’t a viable excuse for lawyers by any stretch of the imagination.
The global number one rule in our post-Enron world is that you do not write anything in emails that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of your newspaper.
In case you aren’t familiar with them, the Darwin Awards“are cautionary tales about people who kill themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race.”
Perhaps there should be a special award for people who kill companies through acts of excessive stupidity.
Moreover, CEO Tim Armstrong moved his foot from his mouth to deep in his throat by blaming the needed cost savings on Obamacare and supporting unusual cases like two women with complicated pregnancies.
When the employees screamed and the poop hit the media fan Armstrong and AOL swiftly backpedaled and reinstated the old policy.
A few years ago occasional contributor Matt Weeks wrote about the “startup social contract” and the repercussions when it’s broken.
If the workers and/or the exec team come to disrespect, disbelieve or ignore this social contract, the company is lost.
Although Matt wrote about the contract in terms of startups, it applies to enterprises of all sizes and ages.
The conference, Women Engineers Code, or WECode, which was organized by an undergraduate student group at Harvard, featured stacks of cosmetic mirrors with the Goldman Sachs logo, a photograph posted to Instagram shows. The Instagram user also said that the bank brought nail files to the event.
One of the attendees wondered if the swag represented “sexyfeminism or gender stereotyping”
I can assure her it didn’t.
To quote a senior manager I’ve known for years, “given the choice between stupidity and malice aforethought the cause is almost always stupidity.”
They are given posthumously to people who die as a result of their own overwhelming stupidity for removing themselves from the gene pool. (They are well deserved; if you don’t believe me then read through a few of them.)
However, in these brave new days of social media we need a new award; one that honors stupidity, sans death.
We need an award for all those who through their bragging on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube draw the attention of law enforcement before they can do yet more damage.
“…a woman who had been involved in a minor cable car mishap sued the City. The only injury she suffered was a purely psychological one: She claimed that the accident had turned her into a nymphomaniac, for which she wanted half a million dollars in compensation. (…) The jury heard the case, kept a straight face, and awarded the nymphomaniac $50,000.”
Fast forward to Nashville, Tennessee 2013, specifically Chris Sevier, a lawyer (naturally) who, through a typo, logged onto f***kbook.com, instead of Facebook.
Poor Chris was so affected by the images that dire consequences followed.
“His failed marriage caused the Plaintiff to experience emotional distress to the point of hospitalization. The Plaintiff could no longer tell the difference between Internet pornography and tangible intercourse due to the content he accessed through the Apple products, which failed to provide him with warnings of the dangers of online pornography whatsoever.”
Seems to me that he must have spent considerable time viewing those images, but, as he explains in his law suite against Apple, it’s not his fault.
“Apple employees know that a man is born full of harmonies and attacked to by women engaging in sexual acts with the intent to cause vicarious arousal.”
He believes that it’s Apple’s responsibility to “sell all its devices in ‘safe mode,’ with software preset to filter out pornographic content,” as well as warn people regarding “the damage pornography causes.”
Ain’t it grand to live in a world where there’s always someone else (with deep pockets) to hold responsible and, best of all, sue?
I just wish Steve was still around; his response would have moved this to a whole new level.
If the founders walk away with a few million each after the investors take their 3-5X return, what will be left for your people?
Those are the people who made the company successful enough to be bought in the first place.
Most of you will agree that the great majority of startups will not have exits similar to Facebook or Google.
Knowing that, it is your responsibility to honor the social contract you made with your employees, when they traded their compensation for equity in your startup.
Therefore, it is of paramount importance for founders to never lose sight of the numbers; the more investment you take the lower your team’s return when the company is acquired.
They wanted to find out whether deep voices correlated with success, since prior research has shown that Barry White-like bass is often preferable when it comes to selecting a mate. A separate Duke study last year also found that voters favor political candidates with deeper voices.
Does a deep voice just open doors or is it more than that?
That benefit proved true even when controlling for a leader’s experience, education, dominant facial features and other variables that might sway decisions of recruiters and compensation committees.
Well, that’s depressing.
Just how big a deal is this?
BIG.
The median CEO, with a 125.5 Hz vocal frequency, earned $3.7 million, ran a $2.4 billion company and was 56 years old.
Not bad, but researchers found that executives with voices on the deeper (that is, lower-frequency) end of the scale earned, on average, $187,000 more in pay and led companies with $440 million more in assets.
(For a reference point, James Earl Ray’s voice is around 85Hz.)
Another question is whether what’s sauce for the gander applies equally to the goose, but there’s no way to answer that one.
Mayew says he would like to assess the voices of women executives as well, but he says there aren’t enough for a statistically meaningful study quite yet. At last count, there were just 21 women CEOs in the Fortune 500.
Welcome to the modern Stone Age world of corporate America.
We human beings are taught that it is rational thought that separates us from other animals—what we aren’t taught is that the ability to think rationally doesn’t necessarily translate to acting rationally.
While irrationality and outright stupidity isn’t new to the modern scene (think PT Barnum’s sucker) social media has certainly opened up new vistas on it.
One expects a certain level of irrational actions from teens, expressed these days by sending nude photos, but if you think adults have more sense think again; a new survey shows one in four adults stores intimate pictures on a mobile (easily hacked) device—which, as an adult, ranks as just plain stupid.
For both irrational and stupid you can’t beat those who turn to Twitter, etc., for investing advice accepting both poster and information at face value.
Startups often cater to irrationality, but they wouldn’t be in business without irrational customers—like the women willing to pay $18 for a box of tampons delivered regularly because they can’t remember to buy them.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,