And The Winner Is...

The other day I stumbled upon an email that I found to be an unfortunately painful awakening as an American citizen. It was one of those chain emails that get forwarded to 100 some people, most of which you’ve never even heard of. You know the type. Anyways, my friend Josh had gotten the email from his dad and shared it with us while we were watching T.V. The email was titled “The Stella Awards for 2009.” I had no idea what this meant or what the email would be about, so I read on. Apparently I’m not the only one who didn’t understand the title, because the opening sentences of the email explained exactly what the Stella Awards are. It stated the following:
It's time again for the annual 'Stella Awards'! For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald's in New Mexico , where she purchased coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right? That's right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head. So keep your head scratcher handy.

Immediately after reading this I knew it was going to be amusing. Yet, as I proceeded to read the top 7 Stella Awards, I began to realize that while I still found some humor in them, I was actually more embarrassed to find out how stupid and ridiculous people can be.For the sake of this blog posting I’m going to skip 7th place through 2nd place and go right to the grand prize winner. It would take too long to explain the rest of them, but if you’re interested in seeing them, by all means ask me to send you the email. Now on to what I would classify as perhaps the most ridiculous lawsuit ever won. I’m going to paste the description right from the email because I feel like it will do a better justice than my explanation.

This year's runaway First Place Stella Award winner was: Mrs. Marv Grazinski, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who purchased new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, from an OU football game, having driven on to the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually leave the driver's seat while the cruise control was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down…….? $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. Grazinski has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.

I don’t know about you, but I was pretty much left speechless. I mean, I know there are some people that do some stupid stuff, myself included, but holy hell this is astonishing. I'd like to believe that an average middle school, maybe even elementary school, child would be able to figure out what Mrs. Grazinski sadly could not. How she convinced a court to get her that much money is also beyond me. There had to be some kind of crazy loophole or something, because I don’t think people are usually awarded money for being ignorant and irresponsible. So, the next time something doesn’t go your way, perhaps you should consider suing somebody, because after hearing cases like this one, you may have some pretty good odds of winning.