CNN has a fun gallery about this: see
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0701/gallery.101dumbest_2007/index.html for all the gory details.
Samples:
"German utility EnBW admits that its employees lost the keys to the most highly secure areas of its nuclear plant in Philippsburg. After months of fruitless searching, the company announces plans to change the locks."
"TextTrust, a company that uses a combination of software and human editors to scour the Web for spelling errors, issues a press release on the most commonly misspelled words it has found 'on the 16 million we pages it has spell-checked over the past year'. "
"After a run-up in metal prices, the U.S. Mint announces that its cost for producing a penny has risen to 1.73 cents, while that for a nickel has grown to 8.34 cents. In addition to costing American taxpayers more than $100 million a year, the imbalance also forces the federal government to enact new regulations prohibiting the melting of coins to extract their intrinsic value."
"The city of Hoboken, N.J., signs a deal to have Robotic Parking operate its Garden Street Garage, tripling the number of available spaces by shuffling cars in and out through automated lifts. When Robotic hikes its monthly fees by 20 percent, however, Hoboken officials give the company the boot. One small problem: Robotic's employees are the only ones who know how to operate the system, and the company disables its software, trapping dozens of customers' cars in the garage for days. After a court order restores its control of the garage, Hoboken pays $1.9 million to another firm to install a new system."
