The road to Hell is paved with good intentions ... and so is the road to comedy. You start with what sounds like a good, solid idea, then you add a healthy dose of reality, mix well, and it blows up in your damn face. All of the following efforts were undertaken by what we will generously assume are smart, industrious people. We will blame their terrible, terrible results on, oh, let's say Gary. Gary, you son of a bitch.
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Apple Spent Five Billion Dollars On A Glass Office Building That People Kept Running Into
Regardless of what you think of Apple products, their HQ seems like a cool place to work.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images"And here is the supercollider where we launch disgruntled employees."
The major theme of the building is glass, both to foster an open, collaborative work environment, as well as to capture that elusive "sci-fi dystopia where all appears well on the surface, but just beneath lies a terrible secret waiting to be discovered" vibe. The design is an undeniably striking architectural accomplishment -- and for a while the "striking" part was literal, because people kept walking into the damn walls.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images"NOT SO FUNNY NOW, HUH, ASSHOLES?!" -- the pigeons outside
Not long after the office opened, three 911 calls were made from Apple Park within a span of 48 hours, all of them because someone had cut their head after walking into a wall. Go ahead and take bets on how many injuries there really were, but weren't serious enough to require medical attention or were so ridiculous that everyone involved was too embarrassed to call.
Apple employees began marking walls with Post-it notes for their own safety, but were told to remove them because they "detracted from the building's design." Apple then solved the problem by, uh, putting stickers on the glass panes -- presumably ones that were far more stylish than a bunch of Post-its. Let's all take a minute to appreciate how the the $5 billion headquarters of one of the most influential tech companies on the planet accidentally turned all of its employees into confused birds.
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A Dutch Highway "Sang" The National Anthem, Driving Locals Crazy
Rumble strips, a standard feature of most highways, warn drivers that they're drifting out of their lane. The Dutch town of Jelsum decided to add some whimsy to potential vehicular slaughter by installing a "singing road," which played the provincial anthem whenever a car drove over it at the designated speed. As a technology, it was all rather ingenious. As a practical matter for locals, it was "psychological torture."
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