7 Weird Workers Compensation Cases You’ll Hardly Believe

In 2014, the wages that workers received for worker’s compensation totaled $6.8 trillion. That’s enough for quite the vacation.

Some injuries, though, are so serious that the injured party will be using their funds to recover and try to get their life back to normal. And other workers compensation cases are just downright weird.

The Weirdest Workers Compensation Cases You’ve Seen

Workers compensation is the money paid to workers when they’ve been injured on the job. When job injuries happen, they’re anything but normal, but these cases are particularly unusual.

Inappropriate Horseplay

In 2016, a pipefitter in Mississippi was severely injured when he fell about twenty-five feet from a gum tree. Even though he was injured at work, he didn’t win his case – and that’s because he was engaged in “inappropriate horseplay” at the time.

The other workers on the project said that none of their jobs involved climbing trees and that they had all warned the man to come down. Video evidence then showed that he started shaking the tree himself, resulting in the tree breaking and his fall.

Essentially, this man climbed up a tree, broke it, and said that his employer should pay him for the fall.

A Fake Robbery

In one case, an employer staged a fake robbery to see how their employee would react. A man wearing sunglasses and a ski mask entered the workplace and handed the clerk a note that says that he had a gun, and to put money in his bag.

The clerk gave the man money, but the man was actually just the district quality control manager from the employer doing a security exercise. Understandably, the employee was shaken up by the incident and was did receive her worker’s compensation for sustained emotional distress as a direct result of the incident.

Water Shooter

In Ohio, a car crash resulted from a man shooting water at the car behind it. The man who crashed into the car was participating in a college summer work program.

The car getting shot was the car of the supervisor of the program, who stopped suddenly and rear-ended the student shooting him. The student sustained injuries from the accident.

In court, the employer said that the employee was engaging in horseplay, and the employee lost the case.

Monkey Business

In a London Zoo, a monkey handler was attacked by a meerkat expert at a Christmas party. The meerkat expert threw a glass of wine at the monkey handler, and the monkey handler sustained cuts on her cheek that required three stitches from the glass.

The arguments were over a romantic relationship with the llama keeper of the zoo. The meerkat expert was cleared of her charges of assault because the court found that she was “recklessly but not intentionally” behaving, and on the case that the court didn’t apply a subjective test of recklessness. There was no retrial for this circumstance.

The monkey handler dated the llama keeper for five years before the meerkat expert began a relationship with him. Talk about some unique jobs.

Lotions and Lace

In a store called Lotions and Lace, a robbery took place that was all caught on the sex shop’s camera. A hooded man entered the shop and claimed that he had a gun.

Instead of complying and giving the man money, the workers started throwing sex toys at the man, who fled the scene after being assaulted with adult merchandise.

It was later thought that this might be another supervisor devised robbery to see how the employees would act in case of the real event, and they filed for worker’s compensation.

Vending Machine

Vending machines are actually the cause of more injuries than you might expect, which is what an employee at Circuit City discovered in 2009. A bag of chips was stuck inside the machine, and Clinton Dwyer attempted to dislodge them. To do this, he ran and checked the machine, much like one would do trying to take someone out in football.

In this process, he fractured his hip and had to be operated on the next day. He filed for worker’s compensation, and he won the case. He won on the fact that the bag of chips that he was retrieving was not his own bag of chips, but a coworkers bag who was asking for help. The good Samaritan doctrine applied to the case.

If you want to win a case like this, you have to have lawyers on your side. See page for details on how to contact a successful attorney.

Windmills

In Ohio in 2013, one coworker claimed that her fellow coworker jumped out and scared her, which caused her to fall down and fracture her left wrist. Apparently, the woman suing had a habit of walking down the halls and moving her arms around in a windmill-like fashion, something she did from time to time.

The woman had a history of swinging her arms around and engaging in other horseplay in the office. The court denied her claim in the end, but this was only after she had already received the worker’s compensation for her injury.

Other claims in court said that she was pushed with both arms by her coworker while she was carrying a package and that she was not participating in any horseplay while the incident occurred. She claimed that she never was windmilling her arms, but the co-worker claimed that he was reacting in self-defense in order to protect himself from her wildly swinging arms.

Whatever the case, we think these people could use some less stress in their lives.

Get Your Own Help

If you actually can believe these cases, maybe it’s because you’ve been involved in a similar one yourself.

If you need advice from someone about what to do in your weird situation, you’ve got advocates on your side. The Advocates injury attorneys are here to help you with your workers’ compensation cases.

And if you want more weird stuff to digest, there’s no shortage of it out there on the world wide web.

Weirdomatic is the place where all weird things come to life through the amazing world of photographs – a corner of our wild imagination or the whimsical face of the reality?