Pound Pup Legacy

By Martha Brockenbrough

Or maybe, like me, you once accidentally forwarded a mushy voice mail from your then-boyfriend to some anonymous lady in the accounting department, who was so impressed by the message that she just had to meet the person it was meant for, giving you post-traumatic stress syndrome any time you see women with big perms and leopard-print stretch pants.

Take heart, you poor fool.

Even if you've completely embarrassed yourself in front of your colleagues, what you've done most likely hasn't been anywhere near as disastrous as the following:

As embarrassing as this must have been, he still takes second place to the reigning king of trash TV, Jerry Springer. When Springer was on the Cincinnati city council, he had to resign his seat after word leaked out that he, too, had paid for illegal delights.

Worse, he paid with a personal check.

But here's the best part. Springer came clean, so to speak, and won his city council seat back the next year. Then, when he ran for governor in the 1980s, he tried to make his indiscretion an asset in his gubernatorial campaign, saying in a campaign ad, "I spent time with a woman I shouldn't have, and I paid her with a check. I wish I hadn't done that. ... But maybe my talking to you about this makes a point. Ohio is in a world of hurt. The next governor is going to have to take some heavy risks and face some hard truths. ... I'm not afraid, even of the truth, and even if it hurts."

The truth did not put him in the governor's mansion, alas. Or maybe not so alas.

He then worried that someone had seen him, so he dashed across the street to a Wells Fargo branch. The teller, knowing she had something less than a genius on her hands, told him she couldn't honor the request because it was on a Bank of America deposit slip. When the robber went back to Bank of America to try again, police summoned by the Wells Fargo clerk nabbed him.

This robber can take heart, though. He's not the only one with bad spelling. The FBI dubbed Robert Armijo "the English Major Bandit" after he robbed five banks using completely ungrammatical stickup notes. He got 150 years in prison for his crimes (and I have it on good authority that the Grammar Police plan to lock him up indefinitely).

You'd think that -- and you'd be wrong. NASA's Hubble telescope, launched in 1990 as the world's first orbiting observatory, contained an incorrectly manufactured mirror. It was a millimeter off -- a small margin for man, but a giant leap from adequacy for a telescope meant to photograph the complex mysteries of space.

The poor Hubble couldn't focus properly, and while it did capture some valuable images, it didn't live up to its billion-dollar promise.

What went wrong? The manufacturer, a Connecticut company called Perkin-Elmer, never tested the full telescope before launch. They tested the primary and secondary mirrors individually, but not together. As Homer Simpson might say, "D'oh!"

What's more, a testing tool called a "reflective null corrector" failed, so the error was hidden until it was too late. NASA had to send astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour to fix the mess.

Oprah disinvited him.

But even Franzen's foot-in-mouth disease wasn't as foolish as the actions of James Frey and Margaret B. Jones (real name Margaret Seltzer), two other Oprah-lauded authors who made up part or all of their "memoirs." Though it should have occurred to a publisher that a former drug addict might not be entirely forthcoming, it obviously never occurred to Seltzer that her own sister would turn her in.

There have been other writers unmasked as hoaxes and thieves, but probably none has lived the spectacularly goofy life of Clifford Irving, who claimed to have ghostwritten an autobiography of Howard Hughes and sold the fake manuscript for an enormous advance in 1972. He spent 17 months in jail for his deeds. In 2006 Hollywood came out with the movie version of his story (which Irving hated). And the New York Times recently reported that a British publisher has released a new version of the fake autobiography, calling it a novel -- "Howard Hughes: My Story."

Who knew foolishness had such a long shelf life?

Instead, if you're as foolish as a certain Massachusetts minister, a California psychiatrist or a former Congressman from Iowa, you could get caught up in one of these "419" scams, which are named after the Nigerian law they violate.

All three men -- intelligent and high-achieving professionals -- either lost huge sums of money or went to jail.

Scientists researching why people make foolish decisions have made a couple of observations. First, people screw up when they don't do their research. This would explain how people get caught up in the Nigerian swindle, how the Hubble went to space with a bum mirror and how publishers had to face the embarrassment of phony memoirs.

Second, people tend to deny anything bad is going to happen to them. This explains all our other fools.

As long as you gather facts before you make decisions, and acknowledge that you'll probably get caught for cutting corners and breaking laws, you should be able to avoid catastrophic foolishness.