Bravo! Now if we can get lawyers and judges to read this. Is there a legal listserv to send this too? Oops! Wait a minute. Might get sued for sending spam . . . .
-----Original Message----- From: oover...@lexmark.com [mailto:oover...@lexmark.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 8:26 AM To: emc-p...@majordomo.ieee.org Subject: How Safe ??? In light of the recent e-traffic on labels, warnings, and litigation I think that this is a good article. A better rant than I could write (and have written). When you need a break ... _______________________________________________________________ By Mark Morford morning...@sfgate.com All contents, except the swearing and the random blasphemy, (tm) (c) 2001 Hearst Communications Inc. MARK'S NOTES & ERRATA Where opinion meets benign syntax abuse... *********************************************** Twenty-one-year-old college student bangs and rocks and tilts 900-pound Coke machine to dislodge a can of soda. Coke machine finally tips over on top of college student. College student dies. College student's parents sue Coca-Cola, vending-machine manufacturer, and school, claiming there should've been some sort of warning. The gods of Fate and Destiny shake their heads and sigh. This is a true story. Coke begins placing cautionary stickers on vending machines: "Warning: Tipping may cause injury or death." This part is also true. Many employees at the vending machine company undoubtedly got a good laugh out of this, wondered what's next, stickers on fine cutlery saying "Warning: Inserting butcher knife into body may cause injury or death"? Or perhaps on large bridges: "Warning: Leaping off may cause death or at least a bad headache." Buses? "Warning: Do not step in front of this vehicle or you might die in a manner everyone jokes about and then how would you feel?" The list goes on, and it too may cause injury or death. Oh how the jokes were flying, yes indeed, much like they probably were at snide ol' McDonald's HQ a few years back when that old woman spilled hot coffee on herself and sued because the coffee was too hot and it burned her and everyone knows coffee is supposed to be lukewarm and pleasing and mild. She won her case. The jokes stopped. And the cynicism began. And let us pause for a moment to pay our respects to what must be a horrendous level of sadness and loss for the family in question, what can only be a miserable and terrible event in the life of a parent. There is genuine sorrow and rage here and the need to assign blame and of course it can't be laid at the feet of the college student in question because he was clearly the innocent victim of a malicious vending machine attack and we as humans can *not* be held responsible for our frequent lapses of judgement or common sense, can we? Can we? Because after all this kid was just being a typical mindless male and was likely just following the behavior of other students who he'd seen bash the machine to score a free Mountain Dew and besides someone at the school probably knew the machine was kinda tippy and folks at the vending machine company probably knew those old models weren't as completely secure as the newer versions. But hey, it's not like the machines were malevolent capsizing demons just lying in wait for the next hapless student to come along and breathe on them wrong and then, whump. It is not as if this laptop computer right here in front of me is right this minute poised to to electrocute me if I decide to slam the lid repeatedly to get it to unfreeze. See that big bookshelf in the library? Pull on it too hard, it'll probably fall over on you. Should you sue the shelf manufacturer? The book authors? Gravity? What if our college boy had climbed atop the Coke machine and jumped off and broken his neck? Is the manufacturer responsible? The shoe company? The concrete floor? Where do you draw the line? This is the ultimate question. It's an ever-shifting line in the sand of human stupidity, a vague cultural boundary defining how much we expect our products and corporations to protect us from ourselves and how much we're willing to be answerable for our actions, a line dividing how logic-impaired we're willing to admit we sometimes are and how responsible a given corporation should be for dumping shoddy and/or dangerous products on the market without warning. In a perfect world (like, you know, Atlantis), it's a fair distribution of both, an equal balance of good faith: people take full responsibility for their lives and actions and don't blame the government or the media or God or big mean corporations when they themselves are caught in incredibly dumb behavior; and concomitantly, thuggish corporations and the government take full responsibility for their products and services and don't try to duck and shirk and scam and dance around the law and pretend they had no idea nicotine was lethal or their SUV tires exploded. Instead we've devolved into a famously litigious culture that rewards competing acts of idiocy, whereby the more ignorant you can prove you are ("I had no idea the machine would tip over on me if I continued to rock it violently back and forth, Your Honor"), the more likely you are to earn a nice hefty settlement and warm approval from a populace whose collective intelligence will now be further degraded by yet another warning sticker and yet another inhibitory and patronizing law instructing consumers not to stick their feet into the blades of the lawnmower or put live animals in the microwave or hit themselves in the head repeatedly with a brick. I do not know the best way to protect the dumb from themselves, at least not without flagrantly insulting the rest of us. But even I don't want *all* warning labels to vanish. I don't want them to remove the plastic guards on chainsaws or the safety locks on bazookas or the volume knobs on small infants. Some protections are necessary and good. Most are ridiculous and painfully obvious, but some are not. But we are entering deeper into dangerous cultural territory, a realm of unmitigated, hand-selected fatuity whereby those with common sense and perspective are drowned in a tidal wave of inane regulations and brain-bludgeoning rules, whereby the dumb have discovered the ultimate loophole and the intelligent can only snicker fruitlessly and where lawyers are allowed to draw the lines of personal responsibility for all of us whether we like it or not. It is a land where the strong survive but the dumb flourish and the meek really shall inherit the earth -- if they can survive long enough. Warning: Life may cause injury or death. Please dress accordingly. DISCLAIMER *********************************************** Please do not pretend you have no idea what you're not doing. You probably shouldn't suck on that if you don't know where it's been. Large bowls of fresh cherries are ideal indicators of potential enlightenment. There is no perfect way to chop an onion. McDonald's does not care one whit whether you smile or not. If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations. No such thing as small change. No such thing as too much lubricant. *********************************************** ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. 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