Imagine if you could sue for every stupid thing you did when you were young? This thought came to me as I read in the Australian today that "The Lutheran Church is being sued for almost $100,000 after a girl's finger was pierced by a pencil at one of its schools more than a decade ago." It goes on to tell us that ".... she was sitting on the floor of a classroom holding a pencil when a fellow student fell on her after being pushed by another child". Pain and suffering, loss of income, blah, blah, blah you know the rest. If I had come home from school at the age of 12 and told my mother that I was aggrieved due to a pencil piercing my finger the response would have been something along the lines of how fortunate I was that it wasn't my arse that was pierced and if I didn't shut up and do my homework it soon would be. At 12 years of age I can honestly say I would have pursued claims of negligence for bad hair days, my toast points being too sharp and Split Enz being number one again on Countdown which would have caused clinical depression followed by frequent attacks of anxiety and sleeplessness.
Fortunately nobody listened and my hair caused me no financial loss that I know of, the toast slice never caused gangrene and Split Enz eventually went to number two and I was able to live a virtually normal life. Even if it had have occurred to me to sue anybody, I don't think it would have stopped me from doing half the stupid stuff I did. And I'm really glad about that. I just hope that we don't have to have new labelling laws put on pencils with graphic images showing infected fingers turning purple from lead poisoning, I really couldn't cope with that.
Ridiculous, how much damage can a pencil do? I also read today that Queensland Health have advised teachers not to use red pen for marking because with some children it causes anxiety and depression! I'm suing for all the circles around my spelling mistakes all those years ago. Seriously impeded my ability to spell and was solely responsible for my current lack of attention to detail.
ReplyDelete$100,000 for a pencil stab?? Ridiculous!! And the loss of income?? Even more ridiculous! Way back in high school during sewing class one of the girls had her finger pierced RIGHT THROUGH the fingernail while feeding fabric through the machine. the teacher very quickly raised the needle while the finger was still numb, cleaned the finger with disinfectant and applied a bandaid. Parents were called, the girl got to go home early and visit her doctor for a tetanus shot. No more was heard of the incident.
ReplyDeleteGosh if I could claim for every little accidental mishap I'd be a millionaire.