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From: BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: Auto accident versus collision; I was wrong
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 22:43:00 -0000 (UTC)
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On Mar 19, 2025 at 3:13:27 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:

> On 2025-03-19 5:50 PM, BTR1701 wrote:
>>  On Mar 19, 2025 at 2:44:36 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
>>  wrote:
>>  
>>>  On 2025-03-19 3:42 PM, BTR1701 wrote:
>>>>    On Mar 19, 2025 at 10:03:23 AM PDT, "Rhino"
>>>> <no_offline_contact@example.com>
>>>>    wrote:
>>>>    
>>>>>    On 2025-03-19 11:45 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
>>>>>>      The law is entirely semantics. Perhaps ordinary people (who don't watch
>>>>>>      fictional lawyers on tv and become legal experts like me) don't
>>>>>>      appreciate this, but a state legislature that employs professionals who
>>>>>>      are specifically experts in legal language and statutory construction
>>>>>>      fail to grasp the consequence of a semantic change?
>>>>>>      
>>>>>>      In this video, Steve Lehto discusses the unintended consequence of
>>>>>>      substituting "collision" for "accident" when Hawaii amended a law. Years
>>>>>>      ago, I was one of those people who stopped using the word "accident",
>>>>>>      influenced by others who wanted newspaper reporters and others in the
>>>>>>      media to stop reporting such incidents as "accidents" because the reader
>>>>>>      or listener would assume that the incident was unavoidable.
>>>>>>      
>>>>>>      But that's not what "accident" means. Neither in dictionary definitions
>>>>>>      nor statutory language has it meant "unavoidable" in which there is no
>>>>>>      fault to find. Instead, it means that the party at fault for the
>>>>>>      incident had not committed an intentional act.
>>>>>>      
>>>>>>      "Accident", therefore, means "without intent" not "without fault".
>>>>>>      
>>>>>>      To the uninformed reader or listener, as "crash" or "collision" is just
>>>>>>      a factual statement without finding of fault and without proving intent,
>>>>>>      "unavoidable" isn't incorrectly assumed.
>>>>>>      
>>>>>>      Lehto went off on a bit of an incorrect tangent about why people were
>>>>>>      pushing for the word "accident" not to be used.
>>>>> 
>>>>>    When I was driving school buses, I found that my employers never used
>>>>>    the word "accident". If someone hit something while driving their bus,
>>>>>    even if it was the merest scratch, it was never an accident: it was
>>>>>    *always* a collision. (I'm sure this would have been true if a person
>>>>>    were hit, although I don't recall anyone ever hitting a person while I
>>>>>    worked there.) I feel sure this was their way of making us take
>>>>>    responsibility for what had happened. We didn't get to say anything that
>>>>>    implied that whatever happened couldn't be helped in some way. Even if
>>>>>    we weren't at fault, I think they expected that we could have done
>>>>>    something to prevent or minimize the event. Drivers were always taken
>>>>>    off the road for a day or two and made to have a retraining session with
>>>>>    another driver after a collision.
>>>>    
>>>>    Even if a meteor fell out of the sky and hit the bus? You still have to go
>>>>    through retraining?
>>>>    
>>>>    I absolutely hate bureaucratic nonsense like that.
>>>>    
>>>  My employers were reasonably sensible people for the most part so I like
>>>  to think that they wouldn't force a retraining session on a driver if
>>>  something like a meteor strike happened.
>>> 
>>>  Then again, my brother - who worked for the same company but drove a
>>>  minivan instead of a bus - had a flat once. It took many hours for the
>>>  repair service to come and change out the tire and then he was told he
>>>  needed a retraining session. I asked why, given the circumstances, and
>>>  he said he didn't really understand it either. But I don't think he ever
>>>  actually *did* the retraining session. It was one of the very last days
>>>  of the school year so it may simply have been lost in the shuffle. Or
>>>  maybe they realized how silly it was to do a retraining session for that
>>>  circumstance.
>>> 
>>>  And that reminds me that I had a flat tire myself once. I ran over a
>>>  piece of something on the road just before I got to the school and
>>>  didn't notice anything off but after I'd let the kids off and was doing
>>>  my child-check (to make sure no one was still on the bus), a teacher
>>>  crossed the laneway in from of my parked bus and noticed a hissing from
>>>  the left front tire. He brought that to my attention and I realized that
>>>  I'd driven over something. Having remembered how long it took someone to
>>>  come for my brother's flat and being in dire need of a washroom, I
>>>  decided to drive the bus back to our office - the repair bays are in the
>>>  same building - because drivers were not permitted to use the school
>>>  washrooms. I took slower secondary roads rather than the expressway -
>>>  and got back without incident. However, I was surprised to discover that
>>>  the damaged tire was not even properly seated on the rim. The bus hadn't
>>>  ridden oddly with the front left side sagging as I would have thought
>>>  given the circumstances. I told the mechanics that I probably shouldn't
>>>  have moved once I knew about the flat and they agreed but I didn't get
>>>  into any trouble let alone forced to take a retraining session.
>>> 
>>>>    When I was a super-secret government agent, the absolute worst thing that
>>>>    could happen was for you to have a car collision. You could walk down the
>>>>    street and shoot someone at random and have less paperwork and
>>>> bureaucratic
>>>>    hoops to jump through than there was with a minor fender-bender.
>>>>    
>>>>    In the aftermath of 9-11, I was assigned as the detail leader for Lauren
>>>>  Bush
>>>>    (George W's niece) who was a high school student at the time. It was a
>>>> very
>>>>    loose detail and we didn't go into the school with her. We sat out in the
>>>>    parking lot in a car, parked near hers and would pick her up when she left
>>>>    school each afternoon. She had a panic button that she could push if
>>>>  anything
>>>>    happened inside the school that would bring us running in.
>>>>    
>>>>    So over the course of several months, as I was sitting in my parked car, I
>>>>  was
>>>>    backed into by high school kids not one, not two, but three different
>>>> times.
>>>>    Each bump came with reams of paperwork and repair estimates (even when no
>>>>    repairs were necessary) and as a bonus on my third incident, I was told I
>>>>  had
>>>>    take a mandatory driver's education safety course.
>>>>    
>>>>    Even though my car was parked in each instance and the engine wasn't even
>>>>    running. They told me if I'd been standing nearby and the car was
>>>> empty, it
>>>>    wouldn't have counted, but because I was inside the car each time when it
>>>>    happened, then according to the bureaucratic rules, I was presumed to need
>>>>    re-education.
>>>>    
>>>>    Whoever thought forcing people who carry loaded firearms to deal with such
>>>>    inscrutable and intractable bureaucracy wasn't thinking very clearly.
>>    
>>>  LOL!
>>> 
>>>  I'm gonna guess that the paperwork was to cover their asses in case you,
>>>  or anyone else in the car, developed an injury after the fact - "I
>>>  thought it was just a bit of whiplash but the doctor says I've got a
>>>  serious injury" - and limit the government's liability.
>>> 
>>>  I hear you though: the bureaucracy seems to be able to conjure up
>>>  mountains of paperwork for circumstances that don't seem to require it.
>>  
>>  All it did was teach me the lesson: if it happens again, say you were out
>>  stretching your legs and not in the car, regardless of whether it was true
>> or
>>  not.
>>  
>>  
> That might work once but I suspect if that started being a regular thing 
> among agents, the bureaucrats would insist that you couldn't leave the 
> car without prior permission from a supervisor or dispatcher (if you 
> have dispatchers). I'm not even joking.
> 
> Last year, I had to have a gastroscopy at a local hospital. I was having 
> a bit of trouble with things "going down the wrong way" so they stuck a 
> tube down my throat to look around, then to make a bit more room for 
> food, pills, whatever to go down smoothly. They sedated me first. The 
> whole thing apparently only took about 5 minutes and I felt absolutely 
> fine when I woke up but the rules of this procedure are that I am 
> absolutely forbidden to drive myself home, take the bus home, or even 
> take a cab. The ONLY way they would do the procedure was for me to have 
> a friend pick me up afterwards and drive me home. Luckily, I have 
> friends that are retired who could drive me and someone was available 
> for when my procedure was scheduled but my friend lives out of town, 
> maybe half an hour from the hospital. It really irked me that this was 
> the only way to get the procedure. I was absolutely fully capable of 
> walking to the bus stop and getting home from there. I asked the doctor 
> and he said it was "hospital policy"; I have no doubt that policy was 
> developed when their lawyers said it reduced liability.
> 
> It would make sense to have a policy like that if I was woozy after the 
> procedure but I was 100% fine. But if I hadn't agreed to that, they 
> would have cancelled the procedure. Bloody bureaucrats!!!

So you tell them your friend is picking you up, they do the procedure, then
you walk out the doors and go to the bus stop. They can't retroactively cancel
the procedure.