New York Airport Bars Can No Longer Charge $27 For a Beer

Brooklyn resident Cooper Lund was charged $27 for a single glass of Sam Adams Summer Ale at a restaurant inside LaGuardia Airport and took to social media to express his outrage. It turns out that he wasn’t alone in his anger at having shell out that much money, when he could have gotten a 12-pack for a mere $17 elsewhere. A second traveler shared a photo of an $11 serving of fries that was offered at a restaurant inside Newark Liberty International Airport. An investigation was immediately launched, revealing that 25 customers were charged between $23 and $27 for a single beer, which officials described as “totally indefensible. All of those customers were immediately issued refunds. The Office of the Inspector General has published a 35-page change to policy guidelines for airport concessionaires, and the biggest takeaway is that it has set a maximum cap price for New York and New Jersey airport concessions at “local street prices” plus a surcharge of 10%. “Nobody should have to fork over such an exorbitant amount for a beer,” said Port Authority Chairman Kevin O’Toole. For their part in the incident, retailers at LaGuardia and Newark airports say the $28 beer and $11 fries were the result of employees simply entering the wrong prices. The Office of Inspector General is asking anyone who is overcharged for food or beverages at the airport restaurants to let them know on social media.

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Why the Michelin Man Is White When Tires Are Black

The character pictured above is commonly known as the Michelin Man. He’s the mascot for Michelin, the company that makes automobile tires. If you weren’t familiar with him before, you may have thought he was a cousin of the Pillsbury Doughboy, or perhaps a more muscular version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Those two mascots, though, kind of make sense — the doughboy looks like a pile of raw dough and the marshmallow man looks like a big angry marshmallow. The Michelin Man, however, doesn’t resemble a tire at all, especially not in color. What’s going on here? Michelin got its start in 1892 making tires for bicycles. Those tires were made from latex that came from rubber trees, and rubber in its natural form is white. When Michelin was founded, the tires on cars were white, as you can see in the photo below. In the early 1910s, scientists discovered that adding a material called “carbon black” to the manufacturing process of tires made them more resistant to temperature changes, helping the rubber to wear down more slowly and making the tires stronger. While tire colors changed, the Michelin Man didn’t. He was a mascot the company felt was already well established, so why change him?

 

 

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The $230 Million Nap

How many times have you dozed off and awakened with your face on the keyboard? Depending on what you’re working on, that can be a dangerous thing to do. In 2013, a German banker learned that the hard way. He was supposed to transfer €62.50 (about $85) from a bank account belonging to a retiree, which shouldn’t have been a big deal. However, the employee was tired and fell asleep on his keyboard, with his chin on the “2” key. When he woke up, he submitted the transfer but didn’t realize that he hadn’t typed €62.50, but had sleep-typed a series of twos. He had effectively submitted a bank transfer for the equivalent of $230 million. Oops! Fortunately, that wasn’t enough to make the transfer complete. Another employee was responsible for checking transfers, but even she wasn’t very thorough. A review of her work showed that she spent less than 1.4 seconds examining 603 payments. She had failed to catch the error and the $230 million transfer made its way through. An automated bank failsafe ultimately caught the error and reversed the transfer, and it’s a good thing for the bank that it did. German law prohibits banks from retrieving any money once it's paid to the recipient. There’s no word on what happened to the employee who sleep-transferred all that money, but his error-stopping colleague was fired for her failures. She, however, filed a complaint, saying that dismissal was too harsh a punishment and the court agreed. She got her job back, with a warning placed in her employee file in case something like this happens again.

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The Rare But Real Risk at the Hair Salon

The hidden cost of beauty could be your health. A routine visit to the hair salon for a relaxing day or a new look can, with one wrong move, change your life forever. That’s because of a medical event called “Beauty Parlor Stroke Syndrome” (BPSS). It can occur by having your head bent backward improperly or for a long period of time during the shampoo process at the hair salon. Blood vessels in the back of your neck could become compressed and result in a stroke. Sometimes the blood vessels in the spinal canal are extra-long and can get “kinked” by the pressure placed there. Symptoms include dizziness, weakness on one side of the body, blurry or double vision, or loss of vision. Those who are most at risk include older people because of the likelihood of arthritis in the neck, people who have had whiplash in auto accidents, and those who have recently had chiropractic manipulation. The best way to prevent BPSS is to avoid hyperextension of the neck for a long period of time. Always make sure you have effective neck support during the shampoo process — even a towel on the cradle of the wash basin will do the trick. Even better is to request that you be shampooed with your head bent forward rather than backward. While BPSS is not known to be fatal, any stroke at the base of the brain can have lasting effects. Now that you’re “in the know,” don’t let that scare you away from the beauty salon. An hour or two of pampering can still be a treat if you take the proper precautions.

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