Chuck Shepherd's News Of The Weird

Fines to Fit the Crimes

In March, Microsoft was fined 561 million euros (about $725 million) by the European Commission after, apparently, a programmer carelessly left out just one line of code in Microsoft's Service Pack 1 of the European versions of Windows 7. That one line would have triggered the system to offer web browsers other than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, which Microsoft had agreed to include to settle charges that it was monopolizing the web-browser business. (Also in March, the government of Denmark said that Microsoft owed it about $1 billion in unpaid taxes when it took over a Danish company and tried to route its taxes through notorious tax havens such as Bermuda. According to a March Reuters report, Denmark is among the first European countries to challenge such U.S.-standard tax shenanigans and is expecting payment in full.)

Recurring Themes

• Being identified with the number 666 (the "mark of the beast" in the Bible's Book of Revelation) continues to trouble the righteous. Walter Slonopas, 52, felt required to resign as a maintenance worker for Contech Casting in Clarksville, Tenn., in February after receiving his W-2 form, which he noted was the 666th mailed out by Contech this year. (However, perhaps Slonopas is not so innocent. He had been working for Contech for less than two years, yet had already been "assigned" the number 666 twice—on the company's payroll books and the company's time-clock system.)

• The Iconic Phantom Black/Hispanic Perpetrator: In February, victims of crimes in San Antonio, Texas, and Terrebonne Parish, La., complained to police that they had been assaulted by, respectively, a “Hispanic male” and an "unknown black man"—whom the victims admitted later did not exist. San Antonio police learned that their victim had been accidentally, embarrassingly, shot by a friend mishandling his gun. Louisiana authorities found that their victim had not been abducted and raped (and had her baby stolen). Rather, she had wanted to hide her miscarriage from family and friends and invented a phantom attack as more acceptable.

• Chinese New Year, especially, turns out not so festive if busy young professional women are unable to show off a boyfriend to their parents. Thus, men offer themselves as fake boyfriends for the equivalent of about $50 a day, plus extras including about $5 an hour to accompany the woman to dinner, $8 for a kiss on the cheek and $95 to spend the night—on the couch, of course, since "sex" is not part of the concept.

• Backward Incentives: Society continues to suffer from questionable company policies that encourage precisely the wrong behaviors. Bartender Twyla DeVito said she knew that one of her regulars at the American Legion Post in Shelby, Ohio, was too inebriated to drive home and thus telephoned police, alerting them to a potential drunk driver. An officer responded, observed the driver, and arrested him when his blood-alcohol read twice the limit for presumed impairment. Two days later DeVito was fired because, as her boss allegedly said to her, "(I)t's bad for business to have a bartender that will call the cops."

• More Poor Planning: (1) In San Diego, Calif., in February, two people broke into a Hooters after closing and stole a jukebox, apparently, said police, mistaking it for an ATM inside the darkened restaurant. (2) Jose Perales Jr., 24, was charged with breaking into Dr. John's Lingerie Boutique in Davenport, Iowa, in February. Surveillance video revealed he was wearing men's clothing when he entered, but left in a dress and blond wig. In fact, while changing clothes, his bare back was visible, revealing "Perales" tattooed on his shoulder.

• Loretta Lacy, 49, perhaps set some kind of record in January as she sped from Sioux Falls, S.D., to Racine, Wis. (about 500 miles away) just to make her granddaughter's school dance. Although her daughter told a Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter that her mother "can make it from A to B faster than maybe the average person," Lacy collected four speeding tickets during one three-hour stretch for speeds of 88, 99 and 112. Of course, she arrived late.              

© 2013 CHUCK SHEPHERD