History HoistByHisOwnPetard / REALLIFE

* At some point prior to August 2014, the Broadway Hotel in the UK beach town of Blackpool adopted a policy that [[CantTakeCriticism anyone who gave a negative review of the hotel on [=TripAdvisor=] or any other major website would be fined £100 for damaging the hotel's reputation]]. A couple were understandably angry that said fine was immediately charged to their credit card, and went to the press; the story quickly made the national news and did far more damage to the hotel's reputation than any online review could ever hope to achieve. It is now permanently closed.

* In the late 60s, the aviation giant Douglas was heavily struggling: the company got a bit too late to the jet boom, their aircraft - the DC-8 and the smaller DC-9 - were selling fine, but in significantly smaller numbers than their rival Boeing's 707 and 727, and there was a significant backlog on the production line, incurring penalties from the airlines. In 1967 Douglas merged with [=McDonnell=], whose leaders got the company back on track. Still, they needed something new for a major breakthrough - and they got it. Several major airlines made a request for a long-range wide-body jet up to 400 passengers that would be smaller than the giant 747 and could use regular airports and runways. [=McDonnell=] Douglas quickly designed such an aircraft, the DC-10 (they were in a hurry to get to the skies before their rival, Lockheed's [=TriStar=]). It got a large number of orders, entered service in 1971 and all looked fine... then on June 12, 1972 an improperly locked cargo door opened in mid-flight, the resulting ExplosiveDecompression damaged most flight controls and a disaster was barely averted [[AcePilot thanks to the flight crew.]] The investigation found out that cargo door design was faulty (it could be improperly locked and prone to open mid-flight without any signals of such condition). Normally an Airworthiness Directive would be issued and the planes grounded until necessary changes were made, but [=McDonnell=] Douglas, fearing that it would hurt the sales, made a gentlemen's agreement with the FAA bosses to skip the AD, as the company would voluntarily made the necessary changes. The NTSB was aghast, but could not do a thing (it was at the time not an independent unit as it is today). Then on March 3, 1974 another DC-10 suffered exactly the same thing, but [[FromBadToWorse far more catastrophic]] (this time all flight controls were severed and the plane was completely uncontrollable). Turkish Airlines Flight 981 ended with a death toll of 346, then the deadliest accident of all time, severely damaging the opinion of the aircraft. During the subsequent investigation it was revealed not only that [=McDonnell=] Douglas knew their solutions are insufficient (Dan Applegate from Convair - the company that manufactured the cargo door - made a written memorandum that the changes to the door design are marginal and that he expects that the major disaster is unavoidable), they knew the cargo door design was seriously flawed even before the first DC-10 took to the skies (a door blew out during the pressurization test, but the company [[NeverMyFault chalked it up to a technician's error,]] ignoring the fact that [[CaptainObvious the door shouldn't blow out in any circumstances, human error or not).]] The company never recovered from the THY 981 debacle: not only they had to made the biggest aviation-related settlement at the time after a flurry of lawsuits (close to 550 million dollars as of 2022 money), but also lost a lot of orders for the DC-10, altogether making a blow much bigger and far more devastating that any AD could ever incur.[[note]]If resulting from a non-fatal accident, the Airworthiness Directives and resulting groundings tend to be brief and quickly forgotten by the flying public - in 2022 hardly anyone remembers the Dreamliner groundings after less than a decade...[[/note]] The MD-80 (the DC-9's successor) and especially the MD-11 (the DC-10's successor) suffered from underdevelopment due to financial issues and the company, collapsing more and more, was eventually bought out by Boeing in 1997.

* In early 2010, Democrats lost their 60-vote filibuster-proof supermajority in the U.S. Senate eleven months early due to a law they had passed years earlier to ''prevent'' such an incident. In 2004, Massachusetts Democrats changed the state's U.S. Senate appointment law, fearing that Republican Gov. Mitt Romney would appoint a Republican to the Senate if UsefulNotes/JohnKerry won the presidential election, which mandated that appointees could only serve up to 160 days instead of the entire remainder of the term. In August 2009, Sen. UsefulNotes/TedKennedy died, creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick filled with Paul G. Kirk. However, due to the law, a special election was called in February 2010 that was won by Republican Scott Brown in an upset.

* At some point prior to August 2014, the Broadway Hotel in the UK beach town of Blackpool adopted a policy that anyone who gave a negative review of the hotel on [=TripAdvisor=] or any other major website would be fined £100 for damaging the hotel's reputation. A couple were understandably angry that said fine was immediately charged to their credit card, and went to the press; the story quickly made the national news and did far more damage to the hotel's reputation than any online review could ever hope to achieve. It is now permanently closed.

* SerialKiller, Israel Keyes, did this twice.

* Rax Roast Beef, a food chain whose heyday was during the mid-80s, was ruined by a one-two punch of an identity crisis and a poor marketing campaign. The restaurant, which once focused on roast beef sandwiches attempted to sell other foods indoors, trying to make itself fancier than it was with various bars such as salad bars, pasta bars and taco bars. Then came "Mr. Delicious", a dreary, monotonic, nihilistic cartoon man who drones on about how much his life sucks before trying to convince people to eat at Rax. It didn't work and the company soon filed for bankrupcy.

* In January 1998, in San Diego, a man named Rodney Johnson impersonated [[UsefulNotes/AmericanFootball NFL player]] Tyrone Braxton. amidst the festivities preceding Super Bowl XXXII (In which Braxton's Denver Broncos were playing the Green Bay Packers). He ran up a $3,000 credit card bill (using a stolen card - not Braxton's) and picked up a young lady, under the impression that he was the NFL star. Johnson was caught within a couple of days of this, because the young lady had such a nice time, she ended up calling the real Braxton to thank him. Braxton (who was observing team curfew in the same hotel and had no idea who the woman was) immediately called league security, who worked with the San Diego police to catch the impostor. WebVideo/OfficialJaguarGator has the bizarre story [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp94ZhRLXMI&t=657s here.]]

* The German Empire's Type UC II minelaying U-boat was the most successful submarine in history if judged purely by number of enemy vessels sunk, but a few of them were unfortunate enough to destroy themselves with their own mines. The most interesting for our purposes was UC-44, which during the summer of 1917 had been frustrating the Royal Navy's attempts to keep the approaches to Waterford Harbor on the southern coast of Ireland free of mines. Since the Germans had cracked the codes used by the Royal Navy minesweepers, the UC-44 was able to lay mines near the harbor; wait for the minesweepers to remove them and transmit the "field cleared" message; and then stealthily return to replace the mines after the sweepers were gone. On the night of August 4th the UC-44 came to re-lay the minefield as usual, but as the last mine was being layed it accidentally detonated; the U-boat boat sank in 25 meters of water and its commander Kurt Tebbenjohanns was the sole survivor. Tebbenjohanns was questioned by the British after they picked him up, which is how they found out their codes had probably been broken. Apparently he believed that the British minesweepers had done a bad job clearing the previous minefield, and that as a result his U-boat ran into one of the mines it had laid during the previous mission. Because of where it sank, the British divers were able to inspect the wreck and discover the actual cause of the explosion; they also recovered logbooks which revealed that the British anti-submarine defences around Dover were completely ineffective against the Germans. Some of the Royal Navy officers in charge of the minesweeping would later claim that they had created a deliberate trap, involving a dummy operation where the sweepers pretended to remove the minefield and sent a fake "field cleared" message to trick UC-44 into coming back and hitting one of its own mines, but they probably fabricated this explanation after the fact in an attempt to save face. In reality the whole episode revealed the extent to which the British weren't as on top of the U-boat threat as they thought, and this valuable intelligence only fell into their laps through sheer dumb luck.

** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_Barschel Uwe Barschel]] was heading into a contentious election campaign and it was unclear whether he would beat his rival SPD-politician Björn Engholm. Enter a man named Reiner Pfeiffer offering to "get dirt on Engholm". However, as with the Watergate scandal a decade earlier, it all came to light, this time ''before'' the election. Barschel, instead of washing himself clean of Pfeiffer gave an infamous press conference including the sentence "Ich gebe ihnen mein Ehrenwort! Ich wiederhole, mein Ehrenwort!"[[labelnote:translation]]"I give you my word of honor! I repeat: My word of honor![[/labelnote]] about the accusations against him being wrong. Voters by and large did not believe him and the CDU placed second behind the SPD in the following elections, albeit with neither party able to form a majority coalition (the FDP was unwilling to vote for the SPD candidate and the Party of the Danish and Frisian minority, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Schleswig_Voters%27_Association SSW]], was unwilling to vote for the CDU candidate, in sum ensuring new elections had to be held). Barschel resigned and was found dead - it was ruled a suicide at the time, but there are still doubts as to that explanation. Had Barschel never started the smear campaign, he would not have had to resign. Had he not given his "word of honor", his name would not now be indelibly linked to "politician whose word is worth nothing".
** Engholm meanwhile won the ensuing new elections in a landslide in part due to sympathy with him having been smeared by Barschel's campaign and was seen as the new up-and-comer of the SPD (even being given the party chairmanship). A few years later it came to light that Engholm had known more about the scandal let on, and had only reveal the truth on the weekend of the election knowing it would make a bigger splash. He had to resign, ending his political career. Had Engholm been frank from the get-go, he would not have his political career destroyed.

* A jokester named Randy Liedtke decided it would be a funny idea to bake some [=iPhone-shaped cookies=] and drive around pretending to talk on them, so he could "eat it right in the cop's face and then ask if cookies were illegal" when he got pulled over for distracted driving. When he ''did'' get pulled over he still got hauled to the station and ticketed... because it turned out he had a warrant for unpaid parking tickets. Oops.
--> '''Randy:''' Wasn't worth it. I'm an idiot. No more [=iPhone cookies=].