At work today, while doing research, I came across an article about a case of a couple suing Google for invasion of privacy and trespassing during one of their StreetView trips. Being the curious person I am, I scrolled through the comments and cannot believe I wasted almost an hour reading through arguments of people I will probably never meet. Or will I...? But it's still fun!
Anyway, I eventually found a link to the Snopes.com article about tort reform. [see link: http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp] It basically discussed widely circulated court cases that were actually not true, and discussed further how there were also other actual court cases people did not know enough about, and how this relates to the public's outcry.
If you read some of these cases, it will likely stir up some emotional feelings like anger and frustration in how our society is turning into a land of lazy, sensitive complainers. But the truth is they were made up. They went on to talk about ones that actually did happen and sound almost as ridiculous, but it brings up the point of how tort reform is difficult to implement since it means either not giving a person a right to have their case in court, or filtering out the idiocracy that seems to be prevalent in our times.
That is a whole debate in and of itself, and I wouldn't mind if you'd like to express your opinions on that. However, what I found was all these years I was among the perpetuators of the misinformed and misguided public.
Apparently all these years, I was confounded beyond belief on why a consumer couldn't know that McDonald's coffee is actually hot and sued for getting burned. I was under the impression that some careless lady drove through the drive-thru, ordered a coffee, drove off, placed the cup in her lap due to reaching for something like makeup, and somehow spilled it all over her legs. And of course, who puts coffee in their laps?
Turns out I, and a whole bunch of other people, are wrong. What had happened was Stella Liebeck was riding shotgun in a car and while it was in park, had placed the coffee between her knees to remove the lid. That's when the spillage happened, and she was hospitalized for 8 days from the resulting third degree burns. McDonalds kept its coffee at 180-190 degrees, which could cause such burns on human contact in 2-7 seconds. And Liebeck wasn't the only one who complained. A lot of people were getting burned by MickeyD's.
It's pretty hard to admit being wrong this whole time but it's interesting how the merit for a case like this can be thrown out the window just because of how little we really know about it. It's important to know all the facts before opening your big ol' mouth.
Know the Facts: The McDonalds Coffee Case [http://www.caoc.com/CA/index.cfm?event=showPage&pg=facts]
No comments:
Post a Comment