Watercooler Stories

Walmart fires iPad-throwing workers

PIKEVILLE, Ky., Nov. 10 (UPI) -- Executives at Walmart say the shoe dropped for a group of employees seen on video throwing and intentionally dropping new iPads at a Kentucky store.

An unspecified number of nightshift workers at the Pikeville store were shown the door after a video showing their antics hit the Internet.

"As anyone can imagine, it made us wince," a Walmart representative told NBC News. "We are also embarrassed."

On the bright side, the rep said the store had not recorded anyone returning damaged iPads they had purchased.

The video, shot in August, showed stockroom workers tossing iPad boxes to one another, and occasionally missing the catch.

"Sorry about that, iPad," the person recording the video said after one drop. "Hope nobody buys that."

Pikeville police said they had not gotten any criminal complaints from Walmart and weren't involved in the matter.

Romney losing friends on Facebook

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- More than 55,000 users have unliked Republican nominee Mitt Romney's Facebook page since he conceded the U.S. presidential election Tuesday.

Users have been unliking the former Massachusetts governor's page at a rate of almost 850 an hour since about 11:30 p.m. EDT Tuesday, The Daily Dot reported.

However Romney has gained 17,601 new Twitter followers since he conceded defeat to President Barack Obama.

The president has steadily gained 853,359 friends on Facebook since winning re-election, bringing his total number of fans on the social-networking site to 33,167,324.

NYC steak-and-lobster rustler busted

NEW YORK, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- A former New York teacher made a tidy living pinching gourmet food from restaurant delivery trucks, a friend said after his arrest.

Charles Ross was arrested this week for allegedly stealing steaks, lobster, salmon and boxes of shrimp off trucks making the rounds at high-end Manhattan restaurants.

A person who answered Ross' cellphone Friday told the New York Post Ross did quite well selling the hot items to other restaurant.

"A couple thousand [dollars] a week," the acquaintance estimated.

"He knows a lot about life and business and school and math," the friend said, adding the onetime teacher "just fell off."

Police told the Post Ross had reinvented himself as a career criminal with three separate stretches in prison for robbery dating back to 1975.

Ross was nabbed Monday while allegedly wheeling a handcart loaded with purloined treats on West 47th Street. He was jailed on $20,000 bond, sources told the Post.

Hamburger takes balloon ride into space

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 10 (UPI) -- A group of Harvard students say they aren't sure what happened to the first hamburger to be launched into space, but they suspect a squirrel made off with it.

The burger was carried into space last month aboard a helium balloon and was missing from its container when the balloon fell back to earth and landed in a tall tree in Massachusetts.

Renzo Lucioni told The Boston Globe he and his colleagues had to hire a tree trimmer to go up the 100-foot tree and retrieve the deflated balloon, but the sandwich was gone. Lucioni told the newspaper a lucky squirrel might have dragged it off.

A camera aboard the balloon had gone dead before the burger disappeared so it offered no help in cracking the mystery. The camera, however, did catch great images of the hamburger, donated by the burger chain b.good, soaring into the clouds and into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The YouTube video went viral with more than 150,000 views in less than a week, the Globe said.

Lucioni and his team want to follow up their landmark achievement with another balloon mission. The current goal is the first burrito in space, but nothing official has been nailed down.