Coffee and the Accident

My Jim Beam induced moment of introspection was rudely curtailed by someone barging into the Coffee House and frantically asking me to call 911 as his wife had fallen over and maybe broken her leg. Suspecting, as one does, the old slip and fall scam I shuffled off to the office to have a leisurely read of our insurance policy after all one cannot be too careful in these matters. As a slight aside I once had a car radio stolen and when I made the insurance claim the premium taker asked me what model the radio was. Of course I replied that I didn’t have a clue. The insurance tosser then informed me that the make of radio would determine what size the check would be. Ah right replied I, I do believe it was a Rolex. Insurance boy replies "Well CB I don’t think that Rolex make radios". Sure they do I retort, It was a clock radio.

So I wandered outside to find the poor lady lying on the sidewalk with a clearly staved in patella (knee cap to you) and a husband flapping around like a headless chicken. As usual there wasn’t much of interest going on in the shop so I thought I might hang around for a while and see what happens. After a while the adrenaline starts to wear off (hers, not mine) and the pain kicks in. I decide to do the decent thing and get her some iced water and an ice pack. She accepts my gifts but studiously ignores the tip jar that I left clearly in sight. After some 15 minutes her moaning and wailing starts to get on my nerves so I offer to walk across the road to the Smalltown hospital. Back in the jolly old UK if you wandered into the ER and told them that someone had fallen over outside, Matron would dispatch a couple of skimpily dressed nursey types and a gurney and everything would be taken care of. Sadly it would appear that in Smalltown (and probably everywhere else in the US) there is no room for initiative in medical care and in consequence much of the ER just stared blankly at me, as if I had wandered in and asked for a Tabasco enema. Of course we know that we can lay the blame firmly at the doorstep of our litigious society and it doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to picture Messers Hemmer, Rhoyd, Piles, Sue, Grabbitt and Runne all following the gurney handing out business cards and waiting for a wheel to fall off. The outcome was that the best that the ER could do was to let me use the phone to call emergency services again. The charming dispatcher told me that they had got my call and the ambulance was currently on its way from Brokeback Mountain and would be there within 10 minutes. And here is the point of this blog. Did you notice the definite article? THE ambulance? In the whole of Kissbotty County there is one ambulance? Yet I have seen lots of different ambulances running around but I guess they are reserved for special customers who perhaps have a secret number to call. I might just try dialing 912 to see what happens.

Now one might like to suggest that the Kissbotty Emergency people should save their money and buy another ambulance so that anyone who falls over and breaks a leg doesn’t have to wait 20 minutes for a 100 foot ride to the Smalltown ER. However the Public Safety people are addicted to the Boss’s chicken sandwiches and every month they have a big meeting for which they order 22 Chicken on whole wheat. So if the choice is between spending money on our sandwiches or buying a new ambulance might I respectfully suggest that you tread carefully?

Note to the legal profession in Smalltown. The broken leg woman obviously didn’t make it, so there might be a juicy negligence claim in the making. I know she died because she never came back into the shop to pay for the ice water, ice pack and the jolly Coffee Bitch conversation.

People can be so selfish at times.