Slightly random, but was keen to get input from others.
My wife & I had lunch at a well known chain restaurant today, as we were walking out, the barriers for the outside seating area were getting blown hard and one of the large metal bars comes loose and collides pretty hard with me and wife on the legs. She’s got minor bruise but the side of my knee took the brunt of it. It’s left a pretty big bruise and swelling, and I wasn’t able to really put weight on it or drive back. It’s now pretty sore and impacting my walking.
When I happened, i took the loose pole into the restaurant and the manager completed an incident form and said we’d be contacted. I advised the barriers weren’t secure and yet no one seemed bothered leaving it blowing out there. There was a small kid walking behind us with their mum, and it led hit them it certainly would have done serious damage.
I’m not really one for claiming for stuff, but mates telling me I should chase it up. Anyone had this happened before? If it was just a little bruise or something I wouldn’t be bothered, but as the days gone on it’s gotten worse.
Would anyone do anything more about this?
At a really basic level if you can show that the negligence of the restaurant has contributed to the injury sustained then there’s a potential claim - realistically if the damage is painful bruising but without any longer term or more discernible injuries (ie broken bones, bad strains etc) and/or it’s not going to prevent you from working then the actual damages you’d receive would be relatively minimal, if you do a Google search you’ll find what kind of damages that you can expect to receive depending on the injury. I would suggest getting to a doctor’s and getting a diagnosis as to exactly what it is so that you can present that (obviously depends how serious the diagnosis is as to whether it’s in your interests to do that).
That said, anecdotally I was once ejected from a gig and set upon by a large group of bouncers, the injuries were thankfully minor, it was bruising, a grazed knee from where the c*nts dragged me along the gravel and a black/bloodshot eye from being kneed in the face a few times, looked far worse than it was and the pain was negligible - it won’t surprise you that the bizzies (South Yorkshire’s finest) did absolutely fuck all about it and even told me that should I pursue it I might be prosecuted for being drunk and disorderly which is absolute bollocks hit anyway - the point is I pestered the firm who ran the security and eventually got their insurers details, I emailed the insurers directly and ended up getting a grand in compensation.
What I would suggest is pursuing it directly with the restaurant and then if that doesn’t yield a satisfactory result try to get hold of their insurers and see if they’ll just agree to a pay out to shut you up.
It’s also worth a conversation with one of the many firms that you’ll find on Google on this topic, even if you’ve no intention in using them they may well give you some cursory useful advice to start the process off.
It’s worth striking whilst the irons hot and asking for maintenance records for the barrier, CCTV footage etc before it inevitably gets ‘lost’, you can obviously ask for that in a nice way and say it’s ’for your own peace of mind’ or whatever.
