“STAY BACK 300 FEET NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BROKEN WINDSHIELDS”
How often have you seen a sign like this on the back of a big construction truck lately?
These kinds of signs annoy me. I don’t mean they annoy me in a “nobody marked this public door with ‘PULL'” way. Though that is very annoying, and I’ve bonked into a few doors due to that reason. No, I mean, they annoy me in a more visceral kind of “please, let a rock fall off that truck and hit my windshield so I can sue his ass” kind of way.
What is the purpose of such a sign? It surely cannot be an attempt at a legal disclaimer. The fact is, if a fist-sized rock that was not properly secured falls off that truck, bounces on the road a few times, and smashes through my windshield, it’s clearly the fault of the vehicle operator. It’s no different than if I were carrying, say, a mattress on the roof of my car and it flew off and hit the fellow behind me. If I had not been there, the damage would not have been done.
Such a sign can’t make up for negligent behavior. It’s like me putting a sign on my car that says “KEEP AWAY, IF I HIT YOU, IT’S YOUR FAULT”. It has no legal power to do anything.
Except annoy people.
Thinking about this has made me wonder about the efficacy of other disclaimers:
“PLAY” or swim “AT YOUR OWN RISK” “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”
There’s obviously some background for these. The second one came from a landmark lawsuit against MGM in 1932. “Play at your own risk” obviously seems to have its root in playground or swimming pool deaths where parents, anxious over the death of a child, sued some property owner.
Does the owner of these vehicles with this obnoxious “Hey, I intend to wreck your windshield” sign actually think that their disclaimer will dissuade a single person from attempting to collect compensation if a negligent truck driver fails to secure his load?
Upon reflection, I believe the sign probably only has a single purpose: to save the truck owner some cash. There’s probably a statistic somewhere that says “trucks with this sign on them have 2% fewer claims for broken windshields”, so they put them on all their trucks as a cost-saving measure.
Maybe it’s a good idea. I’ll put a neon sign on my car that says “I drive poorly. Keep your distance.”
The nefarious waiver
I’d bet that the number is actually a lot higher than 2%, sadly.
So far as I understand it (which is probably not very far), the general purpose for posting signs, warnings, or even requiring signed waiver forms is not to provide actual legal protection. Even if someone has signed a liability waiver for participating in an activity, the likelihood of that waiver actually standing up in court is pretty slim.
I’m pretty sure its purpose is more preventive. If the average person was hurt during an activity that they signed a waiver for, I think the odds are better than average that they’d believe they either couldn’t bring the company to court, or that doing so would be too much trouble (especially if the hurt was substantial but still minor). After all, most Americans see the court system that is sprawling, slow, and above all expensive. Most people have never even head of Small Claims court.
For the sort who have developed habits of questioning and analyzing things, who are less inclined to take things for granted, it might be shocking to think that so many people could be so hoodwinked. But there’s a lot of conditioning in our society to make people think that if they affix their signature to a form with lots of legal mumbo jumbo, than that would make them powerless to try and defend their rights in the vast morass of our legal system against however many (supposedly) highly paid lawyers put that waiver form together.
By extension, I think that applies to signs too. The mandate to obey any sign that looks official has been engrained into us ever since the first day our parents told us to stop walking when the red hand appears and start walking when the white man appears.
When we’re behind a construction vehicle that’s got a fancy company logo on it and a neatly lettered sign saying “No responsibility assumed for broken windshields,” it would only take a couple seconds of consideration to realize that the construction vehicle, however official, would have to still abide by the rules laid down by the even more official and more powerful government that regulates the roads.
But that’s a level of discernment that can all too easily slip past us. We just file the sign away in our mind as “Official,” and forget to ask the questions “Says who?”
My favorite aspect of those
My favorite aspect of those “KEEP BACK” signs is that there’s typically no possible way to read them if you’re actually outside of the range they specify.