Not a brush with death
But since we're sharing exciting stories of this nature...

Last December, I was at a meeting with people from some other departments with whom we're collaborating. Before the meeting began, I was chatting to a head-of-physics from another university, who was telling me he'd had an email from HR saying he should probably think about firing one of the RAs. Apparently this scientist had glassed someone the previous Friday and was on trial for assault. There was speculation that he'd made a number of fraudulent claims on his application for the job.

Naturally I found this quite alarming. This feller sounded like a nasty piece of work. Then a few weeks one of my colleagues sent me a link to an article about the incident...

...turns out the guy had actually been with our group only a couple of months before. And I couldn't have thought of a person less likely to lie on an application, let alone glass a member of the public on a bus. He'd always seemed so shy and well-meaning...it worried me slightly to think this was the same person. Shows how much I know...
(LongJohnBaldry, Tue 11 May 2010, 12:19, 1 reply, 16 years ago)

HaHa.
Guess who Clark Kent really is? Go on, you'll never guess.
(porkylips looks better as the sun goes down., Tue 11 May 2010, 12:31, Reply)