Rule #102: $300 charge for Vomiting in the Cab
I was in Fort Myers Florida yesterday and had the pleasure of being transported from the hotel to the airport in a taxi with 2 8 x 10 signs posted to both back windows that read:
$300 Charge for Vomiting in the Cab
My two questions were when did these signs become necessary, and am I sitting in the place that caused the need for the signs?
The cab driver assured me that this was not due to his cab, but he was required by the Fort Myers government to display the signs because of an incident where the cab driver demanded a payment of $300 to clean up the cab when one of his customers had blown groceries all over his cab. Surprisingly the incident did not occur because the passenger has Ebola or food poisoning, but because he had drank too much at the bar that he was picked up from. Go figure.
I imagined our hero cab driver, already just trying to eke out a living in the face of unregulated Uber drivers, explaining the fairness of the passenger paying for the mess he made tossing his cookies in his van. And the passenger’s lawyers arguing that because “vomiting charges” were not clearly in writing his client could not be possibly expected to pay for damage he cause. After all his client was denied the right to read a full disclosure of possible charges then how could he have possibly known that he would be responsible to clean up the mess.
This is what is wrong with our society- we don’t want to be accountable for our own mistakes, and we are constantly seeking others to blame for our own stupidity. We avoid responsible and hire lawyers to shift to others what is clearly their own.
I asked the cabbie why there were no signs needed in the cab for penalties for urinating or defecating in the cab, and why was there no charge if I decided to break one of the window. He reply was a truthful but painful…”not yet”
The culture that we have developed that requires full written disclosure to buy a sugary drink from a convenience store is out of control. We need to be taxed to keep us from drinking, because we may hurt ourselves.
We now believe it is the government’s role to help us from the evil people that may want us to clean up our own barf. We aren’t going to accept a D in chemistry because no one explained fully to us that we actually had to attend class. Nothing is our fault because we have to live our lives believing that everyone is a complete moron and without someone telling us not to do it we ‘d be lighting ourselves on fire and drinking bleach. No one is responsible for anything because there are no consequences to our actions.
Part of being an functioning adult is to know that if you broke it you brought it.
It requires that we be able to function effectively without needing someone to tell us to clean up our own messes.
We can do better. Clean up your own vomit.