Well, hello, fellow nerd!
And agreed. The fact that the guy could feel it burning, and it caused permanent damage, well, that means it was concentrated enough.
Our soft tissue is not cool with caustic substances.
They said, while refusing to let the matter rest as decided by the legal system…
Exactly. I cant find it right now, but I do remember reading about this when it happened and I’m pretty sure it was something along these lines. Nothing malicious on the part of the workers, but a serious process/system/quality control failure that the company then tried to avoid accountability for.
Of course they’re the victim here. That smelly hippy is going to take nearly $10 million from the hardworking shareholders’ pockets.
(I refuse to use the trailing /s).
The value of a person’s life (from an actuarial standpoint, e.g.) in the U.S. (per a 2016 DOT report) is maybe around $9.6 million. Per this Wikipedia article.
So the award isn’t too far out of line with that. Especially if the man is still alive but the ongoing injuries have reduced the quality of his life by, ballpark, 70-80%.
–
I also wonder if restaurants carry insurance against this sort of judgment. (Or is what’s really going on here is that a restaurant chain of Cracker Barrel’s footprint would typically carry such insurance, but they don’t for some ideological reason?)
Yeah, but it requires someone screwing up badly (which is the case for any hypothetical that ends in concentrated bleach served as water). The disinfectant should be heavily diluted before using, and if the glass was disinfected with the correct dilution but not rinsed the water would further dilute it to way less bleach than in a swimming pool. That the guy got chemical burns means the screw up was much more serious than just not rinsing the glass after disinfecting
And, I’ve never worked at Cracker Barrel specifically, but I would say it required a few someones screwing up badly, unless some poor soul was working the close out shift and then the following opening shift and was responsible for the drink machines on both. Which, that alone is a recipe for poor quality control because no fresh eyes on things.
Wasn’t there something more recently where some cops lied about being “poisoned” at a shake shop because their shakes had a slight flavor of disinfectant due to a failure to properly rinse out the machine? That’s more what you would expect if everything was operating as it should. That this guy got permanent damage tells of an entirely different level of fuck up.
Running a restaurant. Especially one that serves alcohol. Involves hefty liability coverage. It can be one of the top operating costs right up with rent and labor.
The level of obvious mistakes and “don’t do that” involved in something this though. They might have a little problem with their insurance on that front.
I mean that bottle is covered in warnings to wear gloves and eye protection while handling it. It’s not a splash it around willy nilly, casual cleaning thing.
Even small restaurants tend to have a lot of “don’t do that” rules for that grade of cleaning supplies, even if unwritten. Stuff lives with the serious degreaser and the oven cleaner.
Greer said the dangerous mix-up occurred during cleaning at the end of the night shift the day before Cronnon visited the restaurant. The Eco-San solution was left in a water pitcher to soak drink dispensing machine parts overnight, he said, but the pitcher wasn’t dumped the next morning as was the usual practice and a server used it to fill Cronnon’s water glass. src
I’ve never worked in a restaurant, but it seems to me that pitchers used for serving customers should never be used for soaking machine parts in caustic cleaning agents. That’s what buckets are for.
Holy crap, that is bad! It reminds me of the less harmful but way more disgusting story, I can’t remember if I read it here or elsewhere. As told, a woman went out with her co-workers, they picked Applebee’s I think and sat in a dark-ish area. She sips her special maragarita, it’s a little gritty and diluted, but she’s never had it before. Has another couple sips, decides it’s off. Looks at is in the light and sees lipstick on the glass and stuff floating in it, like trash: straw wrappers stuff. It was the glass that servers dump all the partially finished drinks into at the bar, and somehow it accidentally got served to her.
I thought it was here! Weren’t there even cigarette butts in the drink? Blech. Wherever you told that, it was so visceral I felt like it was me lifting the glass up to the light and the horror dawning.
I worked at a large nationwide hotel chain in my late teens as a waiter and busboy. The food and beverage manager once lost one of her nails. It was later found in a customer’s water glass.
When I was 16 I worked the 11pm - 7am shift as a busboy at an all night restaurant.
The cook was a biker. Whenever someone came in he didn’t like, well, let’s just say you wouldn’t believe the creative ways he messed with thier food.
This brings to mind the episode of the BBC’s “Chef!” where the apprentice chef loses a fingertip “plaster” (Britishism for bandaid) in the filling for a batch of mini pot pies and he and the main chef have to destroy them all looking for it lest the contaminated one be served to a guest.
Lesson here that kitchen staff should use bright-blue plasters, not skin-tone ones.
. For a long time after that, going out for drinks looked a bit like this:
