A lot can happen in a second. And on Tuesday night every person on Earth will gain one more when a “leap second” is introduced to the world’s time in order to allow the Earth’s rotation, which is gradually slowing, to stay in sync with atomic clocks.
How big a difference can one second make, you may ask. Quite a big difference, actually. Last time a leap second was added, in 2012, Mozilla, Reddit and LinkedIn all crashed.
And on a personal level, sometimes one-sixtieth of a minute can make all the difference. Here are five examples of people who ruined their careers in just one second.
The 2015 leap second is coming at midnight GMT (8pm ET). Be careful with it.
1972 US Olympic men’s basketball team
Tensions were always going to be high at the 1972 Olympic basketball final between the United States and the Soviet Union. But when the Soviets won the game at the very last second with a single basket, finishing the game with a 51-50 victory, the American public was dumbfounded. The US team refused to acknowledge the Soviets as the winners and left their silver medals unclaimed. To this day, some still question that final second; only three years ago a new book analyzing the event was published, entitled Stolen Glory.
Dan Quayle
The 44th vice-president of the United States became an international laughingstock when he attempted to correct 12-year-old William Figueroa’s spelling. While attending the Muñoz Rivera elementary school spelling bee on 15 June 1992, he encouraged Figueroa to add an “e” to the end of the word “potato”. Quayle wrote about the incident in his memoirs, Standing Firm: “It was more than a gaffe. It was a ‘defining moment’ of the worst imaginable kind. I can’t overstate how discouraging and exasperating the whole event was.”
Charlie Sheen
In February 2011, the star of Two and a Half Men went from being the highest-paid actor on television to being unceremoniously fired. He had ranted about many subjects during a radio interview, but when he called the show’s creator and lead writer, Chuck Lorre, “Chaim”, adding a Hebrew-sounding twist to it, many saw this as antisemitic. He later starred in Anger Management in 2012 but the show was cancelled after just two seasons.
Howard Dean
During a speech in West Des Moines in the midst of his 2004 presidential campaign, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, grew more and more impassioned. “We’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan!” he declaimed, adding: “And then we’re going to Washington DC to take back the White House!” and finishing off his speech with a scream. Although Dean does not blame the “I have a scream” speech for his loss of the New Hampshire primary the following week, it probably irreparably damaged him by painting him as a figure of fun.
Isaiah Washington
The former Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington lost his job on the hit series following his use of an anti-gay slur. Following rumors that he had referred to co-star TR Knight as a “faggot”, Washington said at a press conference at the 2006 Golden Globes: “No, I did not call TR a faggot. Never happened.” The public and even some of Washington’s co-stars including Katherine Heigl expressed great anger at his handling of the situation. “After the incident at the Golden Globes, everything just fell apart. I lost everything. I couldn’t afford to have an agent … I couldn’t afford to have a publicist … I couldn’t afford to continue,” Washington told HuffPost Live in 2013.
