All of These Stories are True, or at Least Truly Posted to the Internet
I just read about a medical doctor, who filed a lawsuit against a restaurant for failing to warn him not to eat the tough, pointy leaves of an artichoke. While in the middle of his meal, the man had to be rushed to a hospital emergency room and is now suing for “loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life.”
Apparently he feels that the restaurant should have posted signs warning him not to eat inedible things. You’d think that a doctor would know better, but I guess he was absent the day in medical school when they taught the lesson on the human digestive system.
In another case, a Walmart customer is suing the store for damages after he ran his truck into one of their light poles. Now, this lawsuit may have some merit: In the first place, Walmart did not have signs posted on the light poles warning people not to run into them. In the second place, the poles themselves could have been better illuminated, perhaps by placing a light pole next to the light pole. Also, why is Walmart sticking light poles in their parking lots where people can run into them at all? Why not have the whole area more safely illuminated by the spotlights of hovering helicopters?
Helicopters are, I’ll admit, expensive, but so are lawsuits. In an unrelated case, a man, claiming that a company owes him $64,000, is suing that company for $38 quadrillion, mostly for punitive damages. This is about 1,500 times the amount of money in the entire world at any given time! Even if the company settles for just 1 percent of the total, the plaintiff will still have enough money to buy, oh, Europe. I wonder if his attorney is handling this case on a contingent fee arrangement.
Remember the case of the man who sneaked into the killer whale tank at SeaWorld and was found floating naked and dead from hypothermia the next morning? His parents sued the park for failing to post signs warning people of the dangers of swimming nude in icy water at night with man-eating animals. Shouldn’t the sign above the tank, KILLER WHALES have been warning enough? Do you think alcohol might have been involved somewhere in this story?
But sometimes, even posting a warning sign may not be good enough. Just ask the AMC theater chain, which was recently sued by a woman who tripped over a “Caution: Wet Floor” sign that had been placed over a small spill on the floor. Clearly, the theater should have posted a sign reading, “Caution: Wet Floor Sign Ahead.”
You can even sue someone for tripping and falling over your own feet. While putting on a huge pair of floppy clown shoes as part of a Halloween costume, a woman in Queens promptly fell over them. She’s now suing the company who rented her the outfit, claiming the floppy clown shoes were big and floppy, almost like, well, a clown’s. Perhaps the company’s lawyers should have advised them to put a sign on the clown shoes that read, “WARNING: Clown Shoes.”
And for cases like these people went to law school?!?
