When employees of a Pennsylvania Walmart learned that there was a car on fire in the parking lot early in the morning on New Year’s Day, they didn’t sit around, stare into space, and wait for the fire department to show up. An overnight employee ran outside with a fire extinguisher to put out the blaze… and that’s when he noticed an unconscious woman inside the locked vehicle. [More]
scary
Tempered Glass Shower Doors Are Shattering For No Reason
By 9.23.15
The appealing feature of tempered glass is that it is supposed to not break into giant jagged shards that can injure you, but it’s not supposed to shatter in the first place. That’s what makes it an appealing material for, say, shower doors. Yet there’s a rare and terrifying problem: shower doors spontaneously shattering, sometimes while a person is showering, resulting in wet, naked, injured people. [More]
Mysterious Substance On Package Sickens Apple Store Employees, Sends 4 To Hospital
By 5.14.15
Retail stores receive lots of packages every day, but no one expects them to send employees to the hospital. That’s what happened at an Apple Store in Monterey, California, when a package covered with a mysterious chemical made store employees ill, sending four to the hospital and forcing authorities to evacuate that area of the mall. [More]
Mechanical Giraffe Escapes From Hell, Sold At Discount Toy Store
By 12.8.14
The box for this toy giraffe says that it “Walks Along, Moves Head, And Shriek.” Verb tenses aside, that description is alarmingly accurate. The toy does all of those things, including shrieking like a demonically possessed creature as it walks along. While that makes the box accurate, it’s not clear to us who the intended audience for this toy would be. [More]
Target Security Officer Finds Loaded Gun In Toy Section
By 6.6.14
Playskool makes a wide variety of fun and adorable products, but they don’t make a 9mm Lugar pistol. Yet a Target employee found a loaded gun sitting out in the toy department last Friday, and want the public’s help to find a man who was in the toy department acting in a suspicious manner around the time that the gun was left behind. [More]
Study: More Kids Injured, Hospitalized After Gobbling Tiny Magnets Since 2009
By 5.20.14
Magnets. They can be fun toys, cute souvenirs, useful money-saving tools, or a life-threatening health hazard. Yes, it’s rare, but a study that will soon be published in the Journal of Pediatrics shows that in the last decade, strong and tiny magnets have become popular, are marketed as toys, and injuries resulting from magnet consumption have increased. [More]
Meanwhile, Here’s Walmart’s Costume Offering For School-Age Boys
By 9.27.13
I don’t know about these kids today, but I don’t imagine this blood-soaked white coat and creepy would have gone over well at my elementary school’s Halloween costume parade. Yet the “demented doctor” is among Walmart’s offering for boys, advertised for kids as young as 7. [More]
Woman Struck By Lightning While Cashing Out At The Grocery Store
By 7.16.13
Did you think that you were safe from lightning strikes while you’re indoors, paying for your groceries? Apparently not. A woman standing in line at a Louisiana supermarket was struck by lightning, a baffling event that a meteorologist called “one-in-a-million.” She ended up in the hospital, and business went on as usual in the store. [More]
Chinese Prisoners Forced To Farm Warcraft Gold Or Get Beatings
By 5.26.11
To get ahead in online games like the popular World of Warcraft, sometimes people will turn to the black market and purchase in-game gold from other gamers using real world dollars. It sounds relatively harmless, except the person you’re buying it from could be a prisoner in a Chinese labor camp under threat of cruel physical punishment. [More]
Um, Why Did My Frigidaire Microwave Randomly Catch Fire?
By 7.24.10
Though not advertised as a feature, Matt recently learned that if you turn off a Frigidaire microwave and leave the house, it might spontaneously combust. A service tech blamed a short-circuiting switch for the blaze, which thankfully didn’t cause any serious property damage. [More]
Chili's Fires Employee Accused Of Placing Camera In Restroom
By 7.10.10
A former Chili’s employee is set to answer charges that he stashed a cellphone camera aimed at the women’s toilets in the Arroyo Grande restaurant. The camera was discovered after a 41-year-old patron noticed something suspicious concealed in a bucket of cleaning supplies. [More]
Something New To Worry About: Getting Impaled By Rogue Beach Umbrella
By 6.30.10
We’re all about safety, so we feel obligated to let you know that at any time you could be impaled by a flying beach umbrella. Cover your body with Kevlar at all times. That’s what one Ocean City, Maryland beach-goer should have done if she was really serious about safety. Her reckless lack of body armor resulted in a beach umbrella sticking out of her leg. [More]
Old Thermos Ad: Use Our Product Or Your Baby Will Die!
By 6.22.10
I know we all like to laugh at old homemaker ads, like where bad coffee will make your husband have an affair or the wrong douche will let the communists win, but here’s one that pushes it a step further. How? Dead babies. As the scary ad explains, a thermos keeps filthy germ-ridden flies away from the milk, and keeps the milk cold, and that means the milk won’t kill your baby. If you don’t buy this thermos, you may as well make your baby into terrible tasting instant coffee and use it to drive your husband into the arms of his secretary, because that’s what you deserve. [More]
"Regional" Pilots Make Little Money, Live In One Bedrooms With 9 Other People
By 3.13.10
It you’re sitting around not feeling scared enough, we recommend taking a look at this episode of the PBS show Frontline. In it, you will learn that regional airline pilots (they fly the planes that say “Continental” or “Delta” on them, but actually have little to nothing to do with those airlines) make very little money, work crazy long days, and often have tiny amounts of experience. Also: the big carriers that paint their names on the planes have no legal responsibility to make sure the “regional” flights are safe. [More]
Energy Co Fills House With Oil, Endangering Family
By 2.5.10
A Long Island family was nearly incapacitated after a local energy company mistakenly delivered oil into a disconnected pipe on the front of their house, dumping nearly 50 gallons of heating oil into their basement. [More]
1.5 Million Strollers Recalled Due To Finger-Chopping Danger
By 1.21.10
If you’re a parent with a Graco stroller who values your child’s fingertips, you might want to take a look at this recall, in which 1.5 million of the rolling digit-guillotines are being summoned far, far away from munchkins until they’re repaired. [More]
Hey, Corvette Owners, Your Roofs May Fly Off
By 12.30.09
If you’re a Corvette owner who really, really likes to feel the wind in your hair as you drive, you may not want to partake in a recall that prevents roofs from flying off as you speed down the highway. [More]
Papa John's Delivery Guy Freaked Out When I Forgot To Tip
By 12.28.09
Arcturus meant to leave a tip for the Papa John’s delivery dude as he ordered over the phone, but he forgot, and then the delivery guy acted in a way that will ensure Arcturus never forgets to tip again — and unsure whether or not he’ll ever use Papa John’s. He writes: [More]
