The Norwegian top politician Terje Riis-Johansen, a member of the Centre Party and currently serving as Minister of Petroleum and Energy, was January 2011 denied entry to Russia. He was supposed to attend an important Norwegian-Russian oil and energy conference in St. Petersburg to meet Russian politicians and give a Key Note speech about “Norwegian Government plans for oil and gas exploration and development in the North.”
Instead, he was rejected at a Norwegian airport and had no other alternative than to head home in shame. The reason; he had forgotten to renew his diplomatic passport, and unwisely left his normal passport at home.
A blind man entered a taxi as a passenger in June 2009, wanting to go home, writes Norwegian newspaper VG.
The taxi driver was not sure where the blind man lived, and had to turn to his GPS system to check the address. That annoyed the 50-year old blind man, who felt the driver was taking too long. In addition he thought he could hear that the driver was driving the wrong route, and suspected he was being scammed for cash.
The blind man he grabbed his credit card from the driver and ordered him to stop the car. He was very upset with the taxi bill, which was a lot higher than he thought was right. Ignoring his disability, he tried to run away from the taxi, with his guide dog in pursuit. The driver tried to stop him, but the blind man saw a solution; hitting the taxi driver straight in the face, giving the driver a nose bleed and causing him to feel dizzy.
When the case appeared in the courts, it was also known that the blind man had, when drunk, hit a police man later the same year when the police came to his house because of very loud music.
Arr! We's been hornswaggled, we has. Shiver me timbers!
Cutthroat Island is listed in the Guiness Book of Records as one of the biggest move failures of all time. The movie, directed by Renny Harlin and starring his then-wife Geena Davis as well as Matthew Modine, was released in 1995 to negative reviews. It was a financial disaster that killed off pirate movies as a theme until Johnny Depp fought back with his Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
Cutthroat Island had a total cost of 115 million dollars and the total earnings in the US was only 10 million dollars, leading to huge dents in the reputation of both Davis and Harlin, as well as a huge hole in the wallets of the production company Carolco Pictures which went bankrupt the year after.
The movie has a rating 5.3/10 on the Internet Movie Database and a lot of movie goers are wondering why the movie did as bad as it did. That doesn’t help those involved much, for whom this epic pirate flick (with the tagline: The Course Has Been Set. There Is No Turning Back. Prepare Your Weapons. Summon Your Courage. Discover the Adventure of a Lifetime!) will forever be remembered as a production with similar results to walking the plank.
You can see the trailer for the movie below:
What’s your biggest failure? Do you have any good stories about failures, accidents or embarrasing events? The more embarrasing, the better. E-mail your story to mail@hotfail.com and we’ll assume we have your permission to put it on the web (anonymously of course!)
One of the biggest failures of the .dot com bubble of the early 2000s was the company Pets.com, set up to sell pet supplies through the Internet.
The company started business in February 1999 and spent millions on advertising, including Super Bowl advertisements and the invention of a sock puppet, which quickly gained cult status, as a spokesperson – check out the picture on the right.
During it’s two years in existence the company managed to hire 320 employees, go public on the NASDAQ stock exchange, invest millions in warehouses and infrastructure and spend even more millions in advertising.
Unfortunately the American public was not ready to order their pets’ plastic toys and tiny beds through the Internet, and Pets.com only saw earnings of $619.000 it’s first fiscal year, with the advertising cost alone close to $12 million. If the spending wasn’t enough to drown the company, they also lost money on every one of the few sales they had, for example by offering free shipping of heavy food bags and dog houses.
300 million dollars had been invested into the company, but after the dotcom bubble burst pets.com did not see another dollar, stock fell from $11 to $0.19 and the high expenditure soon forced Pets.com to close down as one of the most spectacular commercial failures of the dotcom bubble.
What’s your biggest failure? Do you have any good stories about failures, accidents or embarrasing events? The more embarrasing, the better. E-mail your story to mail@hotfail.com and we’ll assume we have your permission to put it on the web (anonymously of course!)
(2 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
