Think your day is going bad?  Well here's a little perspective to make you feel better.

Next time you find yourself grumbling about lack of enthusiasm on the part of your $11 per hour local cable TV repair guy, keep this story in mind.
This past Wednesday in Hopatcong, New Jersey, a cable repairman had a Bad Day when he ventured into the basement of a service needy domicile and found himself face to face...not with a dysfuntional cable modem...but a 500-pound sleeping bear.
Awakened from it's slumber, the bear wandered off and was eventually located and subdued.
It is not clear how the animal, which earlier had been spotted roaming through back streets and neighborhood yards, managed to gain access to the house.  No forced entry has been reported and no investigators have yet ruled out the possibility of an inside accomplice.  So far the homeowner has declined to comment.
The bear and the repairman both escaped without injury.  The bear ended up with a tranquilizer dart hangover.  The repairman ended up with one less pair of wearable pants.
Hopatcong officials are currently formulating plans to relocate the bear to a new woodland home.
The cable guy is seeking therapy.

And here's one for all you cynical middle-class malcontents, ...wanderlust driven and dreaming your dreams of tumbleweed lifestyles liberated from cubicles and time clocks and commitments.  Consider the case of Christopher Artes and Mediana Hendershot, two free-spirits who fell in love and chose to thumb their noses at rules, regulations, and the whole world of conformity by chucking it all and heading out untethered for an uncharted heartland adventure, courtesy of stolen rides on American freight trains.
Romantic, eh?
Right up to the point where the coal car they were riding on opened it's dumper doors and unloaded the lovers, along with the several tons of coal they were sitting on, into a waiting power plant dump truck.  The unfortunate pair was not discovered for several days.
Predictably, and sadly, the results were fatal.
Some Bad Days are silly days, and some Bad Days are sad days,
...and some are sadder than others.

But hey, ...they gave it a shot.

At least they had that.

And just because you've brought a lump to the throat of millions of sentimental movie goers with your real-life, up-by-the-bootstraps, can-do story of one little guy's triumph over towering adversity, it doesn't mean you get a lifetime free pass from the clutches of The Bad Day defense.
Oh-no.
Ask Daniel Ruettiger, the short statured walk-on bench warmer for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, whose pluck and tenacity earned him one shot at football glory, on the last play of his last game of his last season in South Bend, Indiana in 1975.  A chance that he parlayed via the Hollywood hit "Rudy" into a personal legend and eventually, ...a financial scam.
Turns out Mr. Ruettiger fell in with twelve somewhat unsavory Las Vegas style marketing characters after founding a sports drink company (Rudy Nutrition), and thus wound up on the wrong side of the Securities Exchange Commission after they took a dim view of falsified product performance claims used by the marketers to lure unsuspecting investors.  The false claims ramped the stock price up from $.25 to $1.05 per share. 
Turns out that "Rudy" (the drink) neither outsold nor outperformed Gatorade in independent taste tests, as claimed by the marketing team. 
The "team" included, among others, one disbarred lawyer, a Las Vegas penny-stock promoter, and a company president named "Rocky".
According to a report published by Reuters, Ruettiger was left to pay more than $380,000 in settlement without admitting or denying the charges.
Proof once again, that while there is no "I" in "team", there's more than one in "criminal".

In a Bad Day scene straight out of some kind of dark Elmer Fudd cartoon, a Utah duck hunter learned a big lesson about letting animals handle weapons recently, when he turned his back and took 27 pieces of buckshot straight into his buttocks...courtesy of his dog.  According to a report published by Reuters, the dog accidentally discharged a 12-gauge shotgun as the man was stepping out of his boat to retrieve a slain duck. Officially, investigating authorities are calling the incident a "fluke".  Unofficially, rumors are swirling that the shooting may have been the result of a hunter-duck-dog love triangle gone terribly wrong.
So far, no charges have been filed.  Police report the dog was cooperative with investigators and voluntarily surrendered a concealed handgun it was carrying at the time of the incident.
Investigators are also looking into any possible connection between the cur and a recent string of armed robberies that have occurred at butcher shops in the Salt Lake City area.  In all of those incidents, shops owners were assaulted at closing time by a gun waving masked robber described as having four legs, a tail, and wearing a hoodie.

If you happen to be someone who has invested the sum total of your life savings into the Mozambique banana industry, then you might be in for a Bad Day, thanks to a fast moving, industry crippling hoax rumor about a banana borne flesh eating virus that once transmitted, dissolves the skin, fat, and muscle tissue of it's victims.  According to the French news agency, AFP, concerned government officials in Mozambique are working overtime to quell the rapidly spreading rumor which has caused sales of the popular fruit to come to a complete and total standstill.  They are also urging citizens who suspect that they have a skin infection to not set it on fire as a remedy.
(...Huh???)
According to local reports, anxiety levels amongst Mozambique's residents are beginning to rise.  Many locals secretly admit that being eaten by a banana and/or a lion, has long been one of their greatest fears.
Another unexpected consequence of the rumor has been the steep downturn in the personal injury litigation industry which has seen thousands of lawyers idled as discarded slip-and-fall banana peel hazards have virtually disappeared from the Mozambique landscape.
"It's been a hardship." lamented one attorney, covered with burns.  "We want it to go away.  We look forward to the return of the more traditional genuine disasters...the kind we're comfortable with.  ...Boils, pestilence, plague...  God willing, with any luck, we'll soon have a famine."

And, it turns out, when it comes to having a Bad Day in the marketing department, you don't have to be a flesh eaten banana vendor in Mozambique.  You can be Pope Benedict XVI down in Mexico City! 
Seems that when it comes to generating sales of keepsake religious items (the true indicators of genuine faith after all...crucifixes, rosaries, statues, tee-shirts, snow-globes, coffee mugs, back scratchers, etc) the current Prince of Rome is a marketing dud...at least compared to his predecessor, the much beloved Pope John-Paul II, whose every appearance south of the border had commemorative pot-holders and fanny packs flying off the shelves. 
But the reaction so far to the announcement by J2P2's replacement that he will be making his first Papal visit to Mexico sometime before this coming Easter, has been greeted with a collective Mexican yawn, and as of yet, virtually no Pope Benedict merchandise has begun appearing in the gift shops.
Marketing experts are so far at a loss to explain the surprising lack of interest, which is notable especially in a country where the religious demographic is measured, conservatively, at being 90% Catholic.  One frequently repeated speculation, however, is that former Pope John Paul II successfully endeared himself by speaking to the citizens of Mexico in their native Spanish language.
According to a well placed Vatican source, in anticipation of his upcoming visit the the current Pope has begun preparing by taking an accelerated crash course in Spanish language skills and has so far mastered five essential phrases "God loves you.", "My favorite is Corona.", "I was only following orders.", "You know, I wasn't really a NAZI." and "Don't forget to stop by the gift shop".