Contact me at markploftus@aol.com

Promised some more of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business - 2003 Article in Business 2.0. Magazine. Authors are Adam Horowitz; Mark Athitakis; Mark Laswell and Owen Thomas. Being a lawyer and all, I focused on the legal fumbles, which I have recounted below:

Moment 45: An earnest young summer associate(law student playing lawyer for the summer) snagged a gig at the New York office of Skadden Arps and was probably being paid gobs of money. He decided he would send around an email to his friends telling them what he was doing. Quote: "I'm busy doing jack shit". Unfortunately for our hero, he inadvertently sent the email to dozens of colleagues at the firm. I guessing his chances of being asked back are pretty slim.

Moment 77: A 16 year old lawsuit is finally brought to an end. An Asheville N.C. court ruled in favor of 165,000 plaintiffs who had paid $1000 each to Jim Baker's PTL Ministry for stays at a resort that was never built. The plaintiff's share? $6.54 a piece. The lawyers fees? $2.5 million. Must have been alot of lawyers in that case. Like a million of them.

Finally, moment 101. Kmart creditors filed a lawsuit recently against six of the company bigwigs including the former CEO. Among the allegations are charges that while Kmart was marching toward insolvency, the CEO was billing the company for items that weren't exactly company related. Like the $106,000 he billed the company for improvements to his home. Or the $35,000 he charged for a guardhouse. And of course the company money he paid to a driver to take his children back and forth to school. Really nothing humorous about this at all, particularly since the bankruptcy cost 57,000 employees their jobs. With a little luck maybe the authorities will look into these little extravangances and see if maybe our boy didn't break the law here and there. One can only hope.

Finally, on a completely unrelated subject, I recently saw a good quote from singer Rod Stewart summarizing his feelings on marriage(and divorce):

"I am never going to get married again," quoth Rod. "Instead I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house".