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Unbelievable
Sometimes it's hard to keep up with all the outrageous news stories out there -- many of which come from you, the readers. So this is the perfect time to round up a few so infuriating, they deserve awards of their own.STUPID LAWSUIT OF THE YEAR AWARD
Back in August, Starbucks launched what was meant to be a small promotion. The company e-mailed a coupon for a free iced coffee to a "limited group" of employees, encouraging them to forward it along to friends and family. When the promotion got out of hand -- with the e-mail zooming all over the Internet -- Starbucks announced that it would stop honoring the coupons. That might have been a clumsy P.R. move, but it definitely didn't justify what happened next.
A 23-year-old New York paralegal named Kelly Coakley claimed that she felt "betrayed" by the company and filed a lawsuit against Starbucks for a whopping $114 million. Where does that insane figure come from? According to published comments by Coakley's lawyer, Peter Sullivan, it's a "conservative figure" based on a cup of coffee per day for all the people turned away during the promotion's original 38-day time frame. Sullivan says he intends to make the case into a huge class-action suit. Wonder if he takes milk and sugar with his greed.
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK AWARD
When Congress decided to build itself a new underground visitor center, you didn't have to be a prophet to predict it wouldn't be the most efficient construction project ever. But few could have guessed how out of hand things would get. The project broke ground in 2002 with a cost estimate of $373.5 million (after lawmakers tacked on extras beyond the original scope of the plan, like added office space for themselves) and a target completion date of January 2005.
You can probably guess what happened next. The project was plagued by mistakes, delays and cost overruns. Now the price tag is expected to shoot toward $600 million, with a completion date of September 2007 at the earliest, making it, in the wise words of Citizens Against Government Waste, "a monument to Congress's own excess."
SCHOOL DAZE AWARD
Eric Hamlin, a seventh-grade teacher in Jefferson County, Colorado, didn't see any problem with hanging some foreign flags -- namely, from Mexico and China, as well as the flag of the United Nations -- in his classroom. But one day, a school administrator informed him that state law prohibits the permanent display of foreign flags in public-school classrooms. Okay, that makes sense: You don't want someone using, say, a Cuban flag to make a political statement. But Hamlin protested that the law allows the temporary display of flags if they're part of "instructional or historical materials." School officials didn't agree, reprimanding Hamlin and putting him on administrative leave. Later, Hamlin was asked back -- after the school got a lot of negative publicity -- but he declined. Hard to blame him. You see, Hamlin had dared to hang those flags because ... he's a world geography teacher! Run that up your flagpole.
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