Stupid Human Tricks

Engineering & Science Humor - RF CafeThese engineering and science tech-centric jokes, song parodies, anecdotes and assorted humor have been collected from friends and websites across the Internet. I check back occasionally for new fodder, but it seems all the old content is reappearing all over (like this is). The humor is light-hearted and clean and sometimes slightly assaultive to the easily-offended, so you are forewarned. It is all workplace-safe.

Humor #1, #2, #3

  • In Wesley Chapel, Florida, Joseph Aaron, 20, was hit in the leg with pieces of the bullet he fired at the exhaust pipe of his car. When repairing the car, he needed to bore a hole in the pipe. When he couldn't find a drill, he tried to shoot a hole in it.

  • [Times of London] A thief who sneaked into a hospital was scarred for life when he tried to get a suntan. After evading security staff at Odstock Hospital in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and helping himself to doctor's paging devices, the thief spotted a vertical sunbed. He walked into the unit and removed his clothes for a 45-minute tan. However, the high-voltage UV machine at the hospital, which is renowned for its treatment of burn victims, has a maximum dosage of 10seconds. After lying on the bed for almost 300 times the recommended maximum time, the man was covered in blisters. Hours later, when the pain of the burns became unbearable, he went to Southampton General Hospital, 20 miles away, in Hampshire. Staff became suspicious because he was wearing a doctor's coat. After tending his wounds they called the police. Southampton police said: "This man broke into Odstock and decided he fancied a quick suntan." Doctors say he is going to be scarred for life.

  • COPENHAGEN, Denmark - In what has to be one of the most bizarre pleas for help, a Danish man set off a real-life sea rescue mission while playing with toy ships in his bathtub. The drunk 52-year-old called in repeated mayday alarms to the Maritime Sea Rescue Command as he piloted his water toys, claiming he was captain of a 12-crew freighter in distress. Giving a position west of the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm, which belongs to Denmark, he said his vessel was listing 45 degrees and that one crew member had been washed overboard. Authorities leaped to respond, sending two rescue vessels to search the area for 90 minutes. Police eventually traced the phone calls to the home of the intoxicated man, who admitted the false alarm.

  • In its November findings after a yearlong study of correctional institutions around the world, Canadian prison officials recommended that nearly all of its facilities be made to resemble its most lenient, including eventually removing razor wire, bulletproof glass and guards' guns, and giving all but a handful of the most heinous inmates control over the keys to their cells so as to establish "a culture of respect."

  • BRISTOL, England - A janitor at a Marriott Hotel was fired for taking four days to clean an elevator. When asked why it took so long, before his dismissal he said, "There are twelve of them, one on each floor, and sometimes some of them are not there." He apparently thought that each floor had a different elevator and cleaned the same elevator 12 times.

  • A 24-year-old salesman from Hialeah, Fla., was killed near Lantana, Fla., in March when his car smashed into a pole in the median strip of Interstate 95 in the middle of the afternoon. Police said that the man was traveling at 80 MPH and, judging by the sales manual that was found open and clutched to his chest, had been busy reading.

  • A bus carrying five passengers was hit by a car in St. Louis, but by the time police arrived on the scene, fourteen pedestrians had boarded the bus and had begun to complain of whiplash injuries and back pain.

  • Swedish business consultant Ulf af Trolle labored 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder.

  • Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed.

  • A man called his car insurance company to tell them to change his address from Texas to Vermont. The woman who took the call asked where Vermont was. As he tried to explain, she interrupted and said, "Look, I'm not stupid or anything, but what state is it in?"

  • Earlier in 1997, the dazed crew of a Japanese Trawler were plucked out of the Sea of Japan clinging to the wreckage of their sunken ship. Their rescue, however, was followed by immediate imprisonment once authorities questioned the sailors on their ship's loss. They claimed that a cow, falling out of a clear blue sky, had struck the trawler amidships, shattering it's hull and sinking the vessel within minutes.

    They remained in prison for several weeks, until the Russian Air Force reluctantly informed Japanese authorities that the crew of one of its cargo planes had apparently stolen a cow wandering at the edge of a Siberian airfield, forced the cow into the plane's hold and hastily taken off for home. Unprepared for live cargo, the Russian crew was ill-equipped to manage a now rampaging cow within its hold. To save the aircraft and themselves, they shoved the animal out of the cargo hold as they crossed the Sea of Japan at an altitude of 30,000 feet.

  • [AP, Mammoth Lakes] A San Anselmo man died yesterday when he hit a lift tower at the Mammoth Mountain ski area while riding down the slope on a foam pad, authorities said. Matthew David Hubal, 22, was pronounced dead at Centinela Mammoth Hospital. The accident occurred about 3 a.m., the Mono County Sheriff's Department said.

    Hubal and his friends apparently had hiked up a ski run called Stump Alley and undid some yellow foam protectors from the lift towers, said Lieutenant Mike Donnelly of the Mammoth Lakes Police Department. The pads are used to protect skiers who might hit the towers. The group apparently used the pads to slide down the ski slope and Hubal crashed into a tower. It has since been investigated that the tower he hit was the one with its pad removed.

         ...from the Voice One website