Oddity Central

Nearly All Phones in Japan Are Waterproof Because People Need to Use Them in the Shower
German Man Cheats Recycling Machine Out of Over $47,000 Using a Single Bottle
Indian Doctors Shocked After Discovering That Poverty-Stricken Woman Had Been Eating Plastic to Survive

Nearly All Phones in Japan Are Waterproof Because People Need to Use Them in the Shower

Posted: 21 Nov 2016 12:07 PM PST

Waterproof smartphones are becoming more common in Western markets, but they are hardly the norm. In Japan however, almost all phones are waterproof, and have been for nearly a decade now. According to statistics, 90% to 95% of phones in Japan are waterproof, because people need to be able to use them while they are showering.

Japanese users are apparently so attached to their phones that they even bring them into the shower. Manufacturers were aware of this unusual habit early on and realized that in order to succeed in japan, they had to make their devices water resistant. The world’s first waterproof mobile phone, the Casio Canu 502S, was release in 2005, and was soon followed by a series of Fujitsu waterproof handhelds. Before long, every company looking to enter Japanese market had to make their devices waterproof.

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Posted: 21 Nov 2016 10:04 AM PST

A drinks vendor in Cologne, Germany was recently tried and convicted to ten months in prison for modifying a bottle recycling machine and cheating the swindling several tens of thousands of euros from the national recycling system.

Bottle-recycling machines in Germany are fairly straightforward – a person inserts one or more bottles into the machine and they receive a receipt for a few euro-cents, or euros, depending on the number of bottles recycled. But in a case presented in front of a Cologne court last week, one recycling machine ended up paying a whopping €44,362.75 ($47,000) without recycling a single bottle. It turns out that an unnamed local drinks vendor managed to modify one such recycling machine located in the basement of his shop so that he could earn a lot more than the usual spare change. Evidence presented during the trial showed that the 37-year-old defendant had installed a magnet sensor and a kind of wooden tunnel into the machine, which allowed him to insert the bottle into the mechanism, receive his receipt and then retrieve the bottle without it actually getting shredded inside.

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Posted: 21 Nov 2016 06:03 AM PST

A team of doctors who recently performed surgery on an elderly woman suffering from severe gastrointestinal problems, were shocked to discover that her stomach was clogged with plastic threads that she had been eating for lack of actual food.

Tara Devi, a 52-year-old deaf-mute woman from the Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh, India, was brought to the emergency room of the regional hospital in Solan by a local who had noticed she was ill and suffering great pain. After running a series of tests, doctors spotted a sort of spherical mass tuck in her stomach, which they assumed was a large ball of hair and recommended immediate surgery to remove it. However, during the procedure, doctors discovered that what they had believed to be hair was actually a ball of tangled plastic threads from plastic gunny bags. Some of the plastic threads that formed the bird nest-like mass clogging up the woman’s intestines were reportedly up to 7-feet long.

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