There is but one truth to this world, and that is the law of no take backsies. Once something is done, it cannot be undone. Once something is said, it’s out there. It can never be unsaid. The point it that once you make a choice, you have to live with the consequences. Even if the consequences are that you end up looking like an idiot when you’re forced to backtrack because of how bad they were. Here are ten such examples of people, businesses, and entire counties that tasted the sweet awkwardness of going back on their word.
10. Apples Ignores History To Jump On Bandwagon
During the summer of 2015, someone walked into a church in South Carolina and did a terrible thing. We’re not going to go into detail about that because this is a light hearted list, and you can’t really make light of a situation like that. We will, however, talk a bit about the fallout that followed with the Confederate flag. With all eyes on the South, more and more news outlets began focusing on the Confederate flags that were hanging at different state buildings and in stores across the country.
With growing pressure from online blogs and news stations, stores began pulling all of their merchandise that displayed the Confederate flag. That’s all fine and dandy as it is absolutely their choice not to carry whatever brands or designs they wanted, but some companies went completely overboard when they hopped on the bandwagon, choosing to go with a salted earth policy on everything that related to the Confederacy.
This is where Apple comes in. While some stores removed shirts featuring the flag, Apple removed nearly everything that so much as alluded to the Confederacy’s existence, including historical games and applications set during the Civil War. You know, a thing that really happened. Their reasoning was that the apps had used the flag in an offensive or mean spirited way, and that the creators could only have their products placed back on the store if they removed all images of the flag.
Of course they refused, as a Civil War without the Confederacy wouldn’t make sense. After a bit of a hullabaloo online, Apple pulled back on their insistence to ignore history and allowed Civil War apps back on their store as long as the Confederate flag couldn’t be seen in advertising images.
9. Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed To Repeat It
Have you ever heard the phrase “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”? Apparently nobody told Apple this, as years prior to removing apps about the Civil War for being about the Civil War, they outright refused to put World War II apps onto their store because they had implied that Germany was America’s enemy during the war. Around the same time they also refused to allow the sale of a WWII naval battle game because it featured the Japanese flag on some of the enemy ships.
Apple is a global company, and it’s easy to understand why they might not want applications on their service that imply certain countries are bad. But Apple was outright ignoring things that really happened. The Germans were America’s enemy during WWII, and the Japanese were involved in naval battles at the time, just as these games suggested. While being so mindful to not hurt anyone’s feelings at any cost is certainly silly, that isn’t why Apple has made this list twice. The reason is that the WWII games that they were refusing to sell for being so offensive were actually sequels to games that Apple was already selling in it’s store.
8. Scary Stories Finally Deemed Too Scary
Since the first Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book was published over thirty years ago, there have been groups of people looking to have the books banned from schools and libraries for artwork that they considered too shocking and gruesome for children. And for those first thirty years, the HarperCollins publishing company never gave in to their demands. Then something strange happened. For the book series’ big 30th anniversary, the publishing company decided to finally give in and remove the book’s iconic artwork and replace it with more kid friendly images. As you probably guessed, this didn’t go over well with fans of the series.
While the artwork that replaced the work in the original series wasn’t bad by any means, it completely ruined the tone of the books. To make matters worse, HarperCollins stopped printing the original versions of the books and replaced them completely with the new art style. It was like they were stabbing readers in the back and then burying them while they were still alive. When news came out that the original series would no longer be in print, used copies of the books immediately shot up in price online, with each copy of the series commanding a price upwards of $60 per book.
If you wanted the real scary stories experience, then you would have to pay the horrifying price. After a few years the prices of the original books eventually dropped back down to more manageable levels, but the fact still remains that HarperCollins killed the spirit of their series so they didn’t offend parents.
7. Controversial Game Gets Endless Free Press
Released during the summer of 2015, Hatred was an ultra violent game that relied on shock advertising to sell their product. A majority of trailers for the game featured wanton destruction of property and grisly up close murders of innocent and defenseless civilians. As you probably guessed, this sort of advertising didn’t go over very well with a lot of different groups. After the game’s first trailer, it essentially coasted on nonstop free press from outraged parents and news groups who couldn’t see that they gobbled up the Hatred developer’s bait, hook line and sinker.
When Hatred finally appeared on Steam’s Greenlight page, a section of their store where people can vote on which indie games get added to the store for purchase, it immediately shot up to the number one most wanted game on the entire program. The outrage had of course worked in their favor, but without warning the game was removed from the voting process with a note from the person managing the Greenlight program stating that they wouldn’t allow a game such as Hatred on their program. This didn’t sit well with gamers who immediately saw the take down for what it was, censorship.
While the Valve company is free to do as they please with their Steam service, it was clear that they had made a mistake as throngs of users came forward to make their opinions heard on the take down that had occurred on a game that was clearly very popular with it’s userbase. Within a day of the take down, the head of Valve, Gabe Newell finally made his stance known. Apologizing to the developers of Hatred, he stated that he wasn’t up to speed on why the game was pulled down, but after learning the reasoning, he said it was clearly a poor choice and returned it to the Greenlight page.
6. Warner Brothers And The Tattoo Confusion
There is one universal truth in the world. The fans never have faith in anything. Ben Affleck as Batman, Heath Ledger as the Joker, Gal Gadot as Wonder-Woman, and many more. Honestly, the list could go on forever. Every time someone gets announced to fill a role, they’re immediately trashed online for the smallest of things. The most recent case for all of this would be Jared Leto’s version of the Joker in Suicide Squad. Covered from head to toe in tattoos of things like “HAHAHA”, a big lipstick covered smile, and most notably the word “DAMAGED” tattooed across his head, not many people came forward in his Joker’s defense when the fans started to tear his picture apart.
Surprisingly, news started coming out that the Joker we saw in the pictures wasn’t the Joker we would be seeing in the movie, and that the tattoos were put there just to celebrate Joker’s seventy five years in existence. Fans rejoiced at the news that the tattoos would be going the way of the dinosaur, but then came the Suicide Squad trailer, revealing that the Joker would in fact have his tattoos, including the “DAMAGED” on his forehead. Of course people don’t care anymore now that they’ve seen him in action. Fans are a fickle bunch.
5. Norm MacDonald Gets Fired From SNL, Immediately Hosts SNL
There are a lot of differing stories as to why Norm MacDonald was fired from SNL. Some say it was because an executive who was friends with OJ Simpson felt Norm wasn’t giving OJ a fair shake, while others like Norm himself say that an NBC executive named Don Ohlmeyer just didn’t like him and his comedy styling. Whatever the real reason, it didn’t matter. The beloved host of the Weekend Update was ousted from his spot midseason for reasons that a lot of fans and other celebrities didn’t agree with. Now let’s move forward one year later.
Despite being told that he wasn’t funny enough to be a cast member on SNL, he was now being asked to host the entire show as a special guest. Norm quipped that there was no way he got funny enough to be on SNL in such a short amount of time, and that SNL must have gotten worse since he left. His joke was met with boos by the writing staff, yet he continued on. Years later Don Ohlmeyer would leave SNL with a less than stellar record, and Norm would continue to randomly appear as a guest on the show.
4. Changing The Past To Avoid Hurt Feelings
America has had a pretty rocky history with that whole slavery fad that went on for however many hundreds of years. Who was really keeping count?! Needless to say, it was all one big goof and we’ve all agreed to move on with our lives. Boy did we have egg on our faces with that whole gaff, though! For those of you not getting the subtle and nuanced sarcasm in the writing above, the point is that you’ll end up looking like an idiot if you take the things that have happened in the past and try to pretend they were never that big of a deal.
Heck, we already went over the whole “Those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it” all the way back on entry number nine. For some reason, there are still people who insist on changing history to better match the way they feel today.
There aren’t many works out there that get it worse than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when it comes to the censorship department. You can’t go more than a few months before some group has come forward to announce that they’re either banning the books entirely, or editing out all of the things they don’t agree with. Some versions of the edited book have actually been published, but they thankfully never last. There is at least one company that has made a stand against censoring their less than clean history, and that’s Warner Brothers.
Instead of outright denying racism ever existed, they instead decided to include a disclaimer on their older cartoons. It explained that they know of the racist overtones you were likely to find in the cartoons, but that they refused to remove them as they were a part of our history whether we like it or not.
3. Comcast Ignores Indisputable Proof, Refuses To Allow More Facts
Everyone hates Comcast. It’s a fact of life at this point. You just can’t envision anyone working at the cable and internet company who isn’t always wringing their hands together as they cackle in some dark and nasty nondescript cellar. With an overall rating of one out of five with thousands of poor reviews, Comcast isn’t doing itself any favors in their PR department as they consistently end up in the news for screwing over their paying customers for the smallest of issues, issues that are usually caused by the company itself.
One such customer was promised that his bill wouldn’t go up for any reason for twelve months when he first signed up to the service in August of 2014. Within months he noticed that his bill had been rising for seemingly no reason, completely against what his contract had stated. When he called in he was told he wasn’t promised a flat fee for 12 months, and that he was mistaken. It was at this point the customer revealed that he had recorded his original call and had hard proof of what he was promised. Again, he was told that his absolute proof wasn’t enough, and they couldn’t give him the deal his contract stated. Of course he recorded this call as well, and posted it up online for everyone to see, including the FCC.
Suddenly a Comcast representative was more than happy to talk to him about his mistake, only this time the representative told him he couldn’t discuss any deals with him unless he agreed to not record anything said during their conversation. The man refused and ended the call, posting updates online of what Comcast was trying to pull. Once news came out that Comcast was refusing to talk unless nobody could call them out on what they said, the man suddenly received another call from management, only this time they were more than happy to be recorded as they finally gave him the deal his original contract had offered.
2. Game Company Tries To Charge For Free Service, Hijinks Ensue
Ever since video games started coming out on PCs, people have been modding them to fit their needs and to add new content to products that otherwise would have nothing left to them. Whether it was for fun, to learn a new hobby or to build a portfolio, people have been releasing their own personally created mods online for others to use for the better part of two decades. All for free. There have been cases of mods growing into full fledged games, but that sort of occurrence is a rarity. That was until the Valve Corporation and Bethesda announced a program known simply as Paid Mods on the Steam gaming client.
It worked like this. A person would put their mod up on the store for whatever price they decided on, and once it sold they would get 25% of the profits. Valve would of course get its 30% cut and the game company the mod was made for would take the lion’s share with a pure profit of 45%. People didn’t take too kindly to this as they saw it as the game company double dipping in profits and getting paid for something they didn’t work on. But that wasn’t the main issue. It was a lawless land where anyone could put up any mod, including mods they didn’t make, and sell them as their own. Multiple mods that were sold were found to have other people’s mods included, that they had no right to use.
With almost no ability to control the flow of mods, no security to help people deal with broken or nonworking purchases, coupled with the fact that mods had been free and fine for twenty years before this point, gamers turned on Valve, Bethesda, and any modder who dared to try and sell their mods. It got so bad that the owner of Valve, Gabe Newell, opened an AMA on Reddit to try to explain his views on why the program needed to exist.
He was ruthlessly smashed by the arguments of angry gamers who weren’t having any of it.Within days the program was pulled and everyone who purchased a mod received a full refund. Word is still going around that an improved version of the Paid Mods service will one day return, but until then consider it a win for the gamers.
1. Alabama Judge Decides If He Can’t Be Happy, Nobody Can
In 2015, gay marriage was finally made legal in the entirety of the United States of America. No state could deny the rights to marry two people just because of their sexual preferences without facing harsh penalties. Hurrahs and fanfare commenced across the land, except for a certain county in Alabama, that is. Instead of refusing to give out licenses to homosexual couples and facing actual penalties for breaking the law, Roy Moore went one hilariously zany and childish step further.
The law in Alabama states that marriage licenses may be issued by the judges of probate. The big word in that sentence is “may”. Using this wording, Moore decided that this meant he didn’t have to give out licenses if he so chose, and began refusing marriage licenses not just for gay couples, but for everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation. This judge (who was recently punished by being suspended for the remainder of his term) decided if people are going to be treated fairly, they can only be treated fairly in the poorest way. Way to go being the best Alabama you can be, Alabama.