That’s all I need to say really. It’s Friday, it’s been a long week, and I really can’t muster the energy for a proper rant, but c’mON!
I’m trying to put into words what this “Woah, something bad happened - where do I sign for compensation?” culture does to me, but the best I can manage is a sort of frustrated “Gaah!”
So consider this a lit match, tossed into the Pit. The rest of you can add some chunky charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid.
In Billy Wilder’s 1966 film The Fortune Cookie, Walter Matthau plays a lawyer who’s visited by a man who has slipped on a banana peel. Unfortunately, it was in front of a small businesman’s store, just down the block from the big-name department store. Matthau is disappointed, and urges the man to be patient while Matthau comes up with an angle that will pay off.
It’s clear from the tone of this scene that Wilder is lampooning the litigiphilia of that time, and not foreshadowing our own.
What’s really annoying is that for ages it was something that happened in America and we Brits could say “Gosh, chaps, frightfully glad that sort of thing doesn’t happen over here, what? More Earl Grey, vicar?”
Now it’s just as prevalent over here, with every other advert on TV asking if we’ve had an accident.
(“No, the room smelt like this when I walked in…”)
1010 WINS) (NEW YORK) A commuter who was taking the ZZZZZ train home to Scarsdale and then broke his wrist after waking up in the North White Plains rail yard has sued the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Metro-North for $700,000. Joel Binn, 50, a Wall Street computer services executive, says in papers filed in Manhattan’s State Supreme Court that the railroad’s employees should have checked the train to make sure it was empty before they took it to the rail yard.
Binn’s court papers say he boarded the train around 9 p.m. on Nov. 27, 2002, at Grand Central Terminal. He said he had earlier drunk a couple of cocktails at a restaurant downtown. He fell asleep, and woke around 11 p.m. in the rail yard. He squeezed between two cars to the outside and jumped to the ground. “I put my hand out to break the fall,” he said. “I broke my wrist.”
Steve Newman, Binn’s lawyer, said a Metro-North report says his client was intoxicated and asleep in a bathroom on the train. “That’s not true, and even if it were, they should knock on the bathroom door,” Newman said. Binn’s lawsuit asks $600,000 for rail agencies’ alleged negligence and $100,000 on behalf of his wife, Magdolna Binn, for loss of his consortium.
–He lost his consortium, too? I thought he just busted his wrist!
