Lesson: Just Do Your Job, People

Truck Driver Received No Benefits When Claimed Snakebite was Linked to Employment

This is pretty much common sense. A truck driver decides to mess around on company time and winds up in a messy situation, but wants his employer to compensate. Umm no. 

Story has it that the last words of many a Southern daredevil are, “Watch this!” Thank Goodness an Alabama logging truck driver lived to tell about it—although not without being comatose for several weeks and spending more than 30 days in an ICU unit—but in one of the most bizarre cases of the year workers’ compensation benefits were denied to a trucker who, while riding with co-workers in a company-owned vehicle at a remote work site, convinced his work mates to stop and try to capture a rattlesnake, whom they saw on the deserted highway, rather than just run over it. Finding that the snakebite occurred during the course of the driver’s employment, but did not arise from that employment, the appellate court discounted the truck driver’s argument that the attempt to capture the snake was at least tangentially connected to the employment. The court agreed that poisonous snakes might have been considered a hazard within the logging industry, but then added that the hazard could have been dealt with by killing—rather than capturing—the snake. The court concluded that the risk of being bitten was personal, that the connection with the workplace was too remote to support an award.