Richie Ryan
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Chris Fox
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We've all made up some excuse for being late that we're not proud of, like "I couldn't find my car keys," "I ran out of gas," or "My wife spontaneously combusted and the resultant blaze consumed our neighbor's house." But we can all agree that showing up late with a lame excuse is better than crashing a plane on a golf course or riding around with a dead body in your car just to avoid the mild embarrassment or inconvenience of not being on time.
But some people refuse to tell those lies, or behave rationally, or do anything that wasn't 100 times worse than simply being late for whatever it was they were late for. For example ...
Marc Rehmar was not in the mood to deal with any rescheduling, extra fees, or missed appointments when he showed up at the airport late for his flight. He wasn't a mere few minutes late, mind you -- his plane was already being pushed back from the gate. Most people would plead with the ticket agent to get a later flight at no charge, or say "fuck it" and get trashed at the airport bar. But Rehmar had recently given his last shit. Instead of settling for anything resembling a mature, reasonable reaction, he barreled through an alarm-rigged emergency exit onto the tarmac, ran to the truck driver who was backing the plane out of the gate, and asked him to put the plane back so he could get onboard. At the risk of spoiling the suspense, the driver politely declined.
So what did Rehmar miss out on? A big job interview? Life-saving surgery? No, he was late for his high school reunion. Rather than shrug his shoulders and stay home because he didn't really need to travel around the country to learn which of his former classmates had stayed in shape and which had aged like presidents, he decided to behave like a goddamned maniac and bring the police down on his tardy ass.
Luckily for Rehmar, the judge in his case had a sense of humor that wasn't shared by the prosecutor, police, TSA, airport administration or anyone on the plane who saw him sprinting down the runway like a man trying to destroy an airplane. The judge called Rehmar a "good man who saved the screwing up for one glorious incident" and slapped him on the wrist with probation and community service. We assume Rehmar will give himself plenty of time to make his next class reunion so that he can receive his superlative award for Most Likely To Make The News For Domestic Terrorism.
Heinrich Hoffmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Even douchebags with rubber testicles dangling from their Ford F-350s tend to get out of the way of an ambulance with blaring sirens, because testicles aside, they're not monsters. And because no good deed goes unpunished, and also because Russia's version of capitalism is like the "Mirror, Mirror" version of America, you can hire a taxi disguised as an ambulance if you really need to get somewhere in Moscow fast and have a moral compass with negative polarity. It will only set you back 6,000 rubles (200 freedom eagles) an hour, in addition to slowly withering your soul piece by blackened piece.
The problem is that Moscow traffic makes Los Angeles gridlock look like a pleasant weekend drive through rural Virginia, because Moscow drivers have essentially agreed to do a citywide post-apocalyptic roleplay to liven up the workweek. Some businessmen, left with the choice between being late for meetings and using their absurd wealth to show up on time at the cost of common decency, are opting for the latter.
This is obviously turbo illegal, and police are responding by carrying out checks on ambulances, which we're sure won't backfire or cause any life-threatening emergencies whatsoever. Unfortunately, the ambulances are near-perfect replicas on the outside. It's only after getting a peek inside that you realize this "ambulance" looks like something Jay-Z would take to the Quidditch Cup.
A group of 40 Swedish retirees were returning home after a Vienna art tour when one of their number, an 82-year-old woman traveling with her husband, suddenly stopped breathing. But this group of tourists wasn't about to let a trivial little detail like "a woman is dead" keep them from getting home in time for the Swedish equivalent of Matlock (it's Matthiaslock). Rather than pull over and notify any kind of authorities, they kept right on driving. She had already lived a long and happy 82 years, she had wrapped up a great trip, and she probably didn't want her final act on this planet to be a big ol' inconvenience to all her new friends, right? And what better place to store a corpse than on the bus seat she paid for?
Natal Witness Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty
"It might sound cynical," the leader of the group said of the appallingly cynical act, before going on to argue that stopping to call an ambulance would've put them way behind schedule, and nobody wanted to get to Sweden too late. It is important to note that their tight schedule still allowed them to pull over at a duty-free store, dead person aboard, to allow the passengers to buy some souvenirs.
The death wasn't actually reported until the bus was aboard a ferry to Copenhagen, presumably because no one felt like Weekend At Bernie's-ing the poor woman across the water. A local policeman said that the matter had not been handled "appropriately," pointing out that the woman might have actually still been alive when her tour group decided that she had been called home to Jesus. Also, we're pretty sure that crossing national borders with a dead body in your vehicle is breaking at least one law.
There are a few events in your life that are so important that everyday rules no longer apply. Maybe you're getting married. Maybe you or your wife is in labor. Maybe someone is plastering the neighborhood with Ted Nugent posters and you've recently decided to wallpaper the baby's room in pure Nugent. The point being that behaving in a somewhat reckless manner is understandable in a select few circumstances. Your son being late for a tennis lesson is not one of those circumstances.
That brings us to Robert Kadera, an electrical engineer by trade but an out-of-touch asshole fulfilling every negative stereotype about the rich in practice. Faced with the gut-wrenching prospect of the other kids at the country club mocking his kid's inferior backhand, Kadera chose to land his private plane on a nearby golf course to make sure his son got to his lesson on time.
We're not parenting experts, but making your son late for his stereotypical rich person hobby because you were busy taking him for a ride in your personal airplane probably isn't teaching him any sort of lesson that human beings were meant to learn.
Mike Watson Images/moodboard/Getty Images
No one was hurt, because the golf course was covered in snow instead of golfers, but Kadera landed on a fairway that was close to a concrete wall, power lines, and the freaking highway. This master stroke of terrible judgment led to him getting slapped with charges of reckless conduct, endangering a child, and being the least sympathetic person who has ever lived. Kadera's attorney argued that the charges were "too vague" -- an argument that was presumably dismissed after the judge pointed out that nobody had bothered to write a law specifically prohibiting rich people from landing planes on golf courses because they assumed that nobody would commit such a clownish act of dumbassery.
Kadera was eventually sentenced to court supervision and community service, which we really, really hope involved maintaining a public golf course. There's no word on whether his son made it to his lesson, but we're fairly certain that both he and the plane needed a ride home.
We don't know how you celebrated last New Year's Eve, but unless Viggo the Carpathian was involved, we're willing to bet that you had a better time than Ed Rivera, who spent 17 hours trapped in a freezing cold bus. Rivera has cerebral palsy and can't communicate verbally, along with suffering from some of the other shittiness that comes with the disease. So his parents hired a company called Outstanding Transport to escort him to and from his special needs school, presumably because they had been under the impression that "abandoning your charge for nearly an entire day" is not generally considered outstanding behavior.
But Rivera's escort, Linda Hockaday, had big plans, and they didn't involve ferrying around someone who was going to put a real damper on the end-of-year festivities with his "special needs" and "desire to not almost freeze to death in 15-degree weather." Hockaday was in a rush to get a concert at her church, and apparently figured that God would be annoyed if she showed up late after wasting her time helping someone less fortunate. So she had the bus return to the depot, kept Rivera strapped in his seat, and left to celebrate the year that had passed and everything that she had to look forward to in the coming year, such as criminal charges.
Rivera's body temperature dropped, he got so hungry that he ate part of the vinyl seats, and when police eventually found him, he was rushed to the hospital to be treated for hypothermia and dehydration. Hockaday tried to throw the driver under the ... um, she tried to blame the driver, but authorities considered her solely at fault because she seated Rivera in a way that hid him from the driver's view, almost as if she knew what she was doing was wrong somehow. She was sentenced to community service, three years' probation, and a completely toxic Google search result for her name. Ironically, the concert she was in such a hurry to get to wound up starting late. Well played, Universe.
Richie Ryan occasionally works the wood real good. See his things. You can also follow Richie on Twitter, if that's how you roll.
For more insanely ridiculous lies people came up with, check out 6 People Who Faked Their Own Death (For Ridiculous Reasons) and The 7 Most Extreme Lies Ever Told To Get Out Of Something.
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