Wednesday, October 04, 2006

How stupid can you get?

I won't say much about this stupidity myself because this author has said it so well himself. But here it is in a nutshell. A university student sued the manufacturer of a loft bed and was given an aware of $179,001 in damages. What did they do to warrant this penalty? Apparently they didn't tell this Einstein that if he fell out of the bed he might hurt himself.

This moronic university student said his pager went off in the middle of the night and a roommate screamed at him to turn it off. Einstein says he then ended up on the floor hurting himself. In other words this grown adult fell out of bed. Here is the claim: “There were no warning labels on the bed, and it had never ‘cross[ed his] mind’ or ‘occurred to’ plaintiff that he could fall or that the bed was dangerous in any way. He testified that had he seen a warning, he would have been ‘aware of the hazard that was present’ and slept closer to the wall, as he had done after the accident.” Maybe the warning should have said: "Do not use if drowsy as injuries may result."

I had a bunk bed as a kid. I was on the top and my brother had the bottom bunk. I never fell out. I did jump out now and then but never fell out. But I was only around eight so obviously much more intelligent than this student. And I can't tell you how horrified I was in Amsterdam recently. The bed at the hotel was quite high off the ground. In fact the mattress was even with the window sill. The sill intself was quite wide and the windows were massive. Worse yet the window was open and had nothing to prevent things or people from falling out. And it was a very long drop to the street. There was no warning label telling me that I rolled out of bed in my sleep onto the sill I could plunge to the ground below and die. I just sort of figured it out on my own and shut the window.

Thankfully an appeals court overturned this silly award but there was still a jury of 12 of the students peers who voted with him. How do I know they were his peers? Because they were obviously morons as well.