Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (70 page)

When it was defense attorney Manning’s turn to speak, he painted Pearson as a “bitter man” who was still reeling from a divorce. Manning spoke of earlier disputes between Pearson and the Chungs. Three times he had been banned from their shop for being rude and had to beg them to let him back in. Manning also told the court that Pearson was desperate for money. Although he made $100,000 per year, he’d maxed out his credit cards in order to pay for legal fees from a previous lawsuit against his ex-wife (which was dismissed for being frivolous). “This case is very simple,” said Manning. “It’s about one sign and the plaintiff’s outlandish interpretation.”

Pearson called several witnesses to the stand who said they’d also had trouble at the Chungs’ laundromat. He even called a fellow administrative law judge, who testified that it is indeed important for a judge to wear a nice suit to work. When Pearson took the stand himself to be cross-examined by Manning, he started crying. “What if this had been…?” He never even finished the sentence and ran out of the courtroom. “This case shocks me on a daily basis,” Manning told reporters that night.

The next day, Soo Chung cried on the stand—twice—when describing the ordeal. And while many in the press made light of the proceedings, the Chungs weren’t laughing, “It’s not humorous, not funny, and nobody would have thought that something like this would have ever happened,” said Soo, who added that they were thinking about moving back to Korea.

Pearson lost. Judge Bartnoff wrote in her ruling, “I have significant concerns that the plaintiff is acting in bad faith because of the breathtaking magnitude of the expansion he seeks.” Pearson was ordered to pay the Chungs’ court costs, but not their legal fees.

He filed an appeal based on the assumption that the judge had made a “fundamental legal error” because she failed to comprehend the true nature of “Satisfaction Guaranteed.” The second judge dismissed the appeal. So Pearson filed
another
one. The third judge threw it out, ruling that Judge Bartnoff’s original decision showed “basic common sense.”

In 2008, after being denied reinstatement as a judge (thanks in part to the negative press he brought upon himself and his profession), Pearson sued the D.C. government for $1 million for wrongful termination. He lost. Pearson threatened to take his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the statute of limitations ran out before he had the chance. At last report, Pearson was still unemployed…but still has an active license to practice law.

Although the Chungs “won,” the three-year-long lawsuit put Custom Cleaners out of business. Today, they are focusing their attention on their original shop, Happy Cleaners. And there’s no sign on the wall that promises “Satisfaction Guaranteed.”

In 2009 two-year-old Natalie Jasmer was playing hide-and-seek with her two older siblings at their Greenville, Pennsylvania, home. And it turns out that Natalie is
really
good at the game—her family looked and looked, but couldn’t find her. They called police and friends, and for an hour, a crowd of people searched all over town for her, fearing the worst. Natalie was eventually found—safe and sound—by the family dog. She’d hidden in a drawer underneath the washing machine in the laundry room and then fallen asleep. “I’m sorry,” said Natalie.

A four-year-old girl was visiting her father at the oil refinery in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, where he worked. While he was briefly distracted with a work matter, the little girl climbed onto a forklift and released the brake, which started the machine rolling. It went only about 20 feet…because it was stopped by a 400-gallon tank of heating oil. The forklift rammed the oil tank with such force that it punctured the hull, spilling about 130 gallons of heating oil onto the ground and into a sewer. “We’re still not sure how the little girl released the brake. Four-year-olds don’t have the kind of strength it takes to do that on a forklift,” said a police spokesman.

In May 2009, four-year-old Daniel Blair of London decided that his one-week-old Cocker Spaniel puppy needed his first bath. So he put the dog into the smallest pool of water he could find—the toilet. Once Daniel washed all the mud off the dog, he flushed the toilet…with the puppy still in it. Daniel immediately told his mother what he’d done, and she called a plumber who was able to
locate the dog in an underground pipe 20 yards from the house. Amazingly, the dog survived.

Madeline Hill runs a pub attached to her house in Sittingbourne, England. One night she was sitting in her kitchen counting up the night’s cash earnings when she heard a knock at the door. She went to answer it, but first did what she always does with her cash if she’s interrupted while counting it—she put it in the microwave. While Hill was out of the room, her 20-month-old son, Jordan, toddled into the room and pressed a bunch of buttons on the microwave, turning it on. The money, about $1,500, was burned to a crisp. (Hill doesn’t put her money in the microwave anymore.)

In 2008 Bill Waters of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was traveling through Texas and stopped at an antique store in the small town of Shamrock. Underneath a wooden crate full of old medicine bottles, Waters found an old leather-bound ledger that looked like it must have been 100 years old. On the front, in fading letters, was written “Castles Formulas.” Waters paid $200 for the book, intending to sell it for at least that on eBay. But when he began preparing it for sale, he starting thumbing through it and found prescription sheets from “W.B. Morrison & Co. Old Corner Drug Store, Waco, Texas.” He did some research and found out that a man named John Castles was a pharmacist at Morrison’s in the 1880s. The formulas were for things like piano polish, hair restorer, cough syrup, and a stomach-pain remedy…called D Peppers Pepsin Bitters. More research revealed that Morrison’s is where, in 1885, pharmacist Charles Alderton invented Dr Pepper, based on Castles’s D Peppers Pepsin Bitters. In other words, Waters had discovered the original recipe for Dr Pepper. (Today, the company that makes the soda is secretive about its flavor blend, but if they’re still using Castles’s instructions, the secret ingredient is mandrake root.) Waters plans to sell the book at auction, where it’s expected to fetch as much as $75,000.

On April 26, 1986, a safety test gone terribly wrong destroyed one of the four nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl power station in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine. Notoriously secretive—particularly where issues of nuclear technology were involved—the Soviet government instituted a news blackout and tried to prevent any information about the accident from leaving the country. It didn’t work. A large plume of radioactive debris entered the atmosphere and crossed Soviet borders, where it set off radiation detectors at several European nuclear power plants. By studying weather patterns and satellite photographs, western countries were able to determine the approximate source of the nuclear fallout.

Under international pressure, Soviet officials eventually admitted that there had been an accident. But that’s about all they said. As radiation continued to spew from the damaged reactor, scientists in the West could only speculate about the extent of the damage—and the danger it posed to the rest of the world.

As the cloud of radioactive debris spread across Europe, western governments scrambled to implement safety measures. Many banned food imports from all points east. Polish officials prohibited the sale of milk from grass-fed cows, and Sweden warned its citizens not to drink water from open wells. West Germans were advised to stay inside and out of the rain. Most of these governments distributed iodine tablets, which were taken to prevent the thyroid gland from absorbing radiation from contaminated food.

The fallout affected North America, too. One week after the accident, Chernobyl radiation was detected at ground level in the
United States—first on the West Coast and later throughout the country. Though the EPA was quick to say that the increased radiation levels were too small to pose any real danger, drugstores reported a run on iodine tablets.

The world had to wait four months for Soviet scientists to release any details about the damaged reactor. Even then, experts disagreed on what the health effects would be. For the most part, advocates of nuclear energy downplayed the risks; opponents exaggerated them. Though debate over the long-term health and environmental effects of Chernobyl continues today, the story of how the accident came to happen has been fairly well established.

A nuclear power plant is not unlike a conventional coal or oil-fired plant. They all boil water to produce steam; the steam drives big, electricity-generating turbines. The difference is in how they heat the water. The heat source in a nuclear plant is
fission—
the splitting of atoms—in a controlled chain reaction.

For those of us who weren’t paying attention in science class, here’s a recap of how it works: Atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. When a single atom of nuclear fuel (Uranium-235) splits, it sends two or three neutrons flying off into space. When these neutrons run into other U-235 atoms, it causes
those
atoms to split—sending more neutrons flying, causing still more atoms to split, in ever-increasing numbers. And each time one of these atoms splits, it releases energy. This is the chain reaction that’s at the heart of nuclear power.

In a nuclear power plant, this released energy is absorbed by water as
thermal
, or heat, energy, and used to create the steam that drives the steam turbines. The faster the chain reaction is allowed to happen, the more energy it releases. This translates into greater heat and more steam—spinning the turbines faster to generate more electricity.

Plant operators are able to regulate this chain reaction by inserting
control rods
into the reactor. Control rods are made of a substance (such as cadmium or boron) that absorbs neutrons. Should the chain reaction become too “hot,” plant operators can insert
more control rods, thereby reducing the number of neutrons flying around inside the reactor. This causes the rate of the nuclear chain reaction to slow and reduces the amount of energy being released.