Holiday Follies

Random stuff I ran across this week that appeared to come from the "oops" department:

• A new robot by Hitachi was demonstrated for reporters recently; it's designed to run errands in offices, but it crashed into a desk during its demo run.


• A guy driving around Ft. Worth this week attracted the attention of the police when they saw that he was playing an X-rated DVD on a screen in his vehicle. Perhaps that was a bad time for him to also be driving without his license and with an open container of beer in the car.


• This had the potential to be a good "oops," unless you were the owner: A change machine at an Indiana car wash started spitting out cash like it was a slot machine to an unsuspecting customer (who was at least honest enough to collect the booty, take it to a police station and call the owner).


• A man in the Miami area, running from police after being seen trying to break into a car in a casino parking lot, jumped into a nearby lake, where he was later killed by an alligator.


• A man trying to repossess an SUV in a donut-shop parking lot did his job so quickly that he failed to notice that the owner's two children were still in the vehicle.


• And finally, United Airlines threw a Thanksgiving dinner for its Chicago-area employees that made five of them sick.

I hope everyone had a great vacation; it's back to the grind in the morning.