With all due sympathy to the girl (who should have never been put in this situation), some sitcom writer somewhere must be kicking himself thinking “I SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT!!!”

I’m trying to stop laughing.  Really.  I will send this to the offspring, as they tend to read books while walking despite my warnings that it is a bad idea (although the teen walking into a bollard and slamming his bollocks was a hint).

I suppose this is going to be the city’s fault?  I guess if she was blind it could have happened, too, unless there was some tactile warning.

“A city department had the manhole open to flush a sewer line. It does beg the question why there were no cones or anything around the open hole to warn anyone, regardless of the distraction, before they actually plunge into blackness.”

You bleeding-heart nanny-state liberals with your belief in a world free of risk.

I’ll never forget many heated discussions about this I had with my high school shop teacher, Mr. Smith.

He may have been missing an arm and several fingers, was deaf and blind in one eye, had no hair on the left side of his head, but by god he didn’t expect the nanny-state to save him from himself!…

At least he only managed to hurt himself.  The fucking idiot engineer on a Los Angeles Metrolink train who was texting instead of watching the tracks managed to kill himself and 24 innocent people when he missed a red light.

For its part, the Department of Environmental Protection said its workers had turned away briefly to grab some cones when the incident occurred.

This is why:

For its part, the Department of Environmental Protection said its workers had turned away briefly to grab some cones when the incident occurred.

Triplanetary, sounds like somebody didn’t follow procedure.  Cones first, then hole!

I am trying really, really hard to contain my schadenfreude, and it’s not like there was a serious injury to put the brakes on it by making me feel bad for her.  I can only hope she learned her lesson and won’t grow up to be like my dad, who continues to text/email while driving despite having previously been the last driver in a pile-up while talking on the phone.

Slightly OT, am I the only one who’s noticed people texting while driving as an unintended, but entirely foreseeable, consequence of those stupid hands-free laws?

I guess if she was blind it could have happened, too, unless there was some tactile warning.

Maybe a cane could have prevented it?

But this made me laugh:

The family said they will file a lawsuit—for what, though, is not immediately clear.

But, yeah, if the family’s hoping for a big pay out, they’re likely going to be disappointed.  They’ll most likely get medical bills covered plus a little extra CYA money.

If New York City is anything like Chicago, probably there was no warning because the Warning Cone Management Staff was on a two-hour coffee break.

Oh hell, I do not want anyone this stupid reproducing and passing on the incredibly stupid gene into the gene pool.

Wait until a teen falls in a manhole while sexting!

Have you ever stepped in or on something you wish you shouldn’t have?  The only reason falling into open manhole doesn’t happen very often is that most manholes are properly surrounded by cones or sawhorses before they’re opened.

My own father fell into an open manhole something like 45 or 50 years ago, before cell phones even existed.  He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t distracted, it wasn’t nighttime, he wasn’t running heedlessly down the street.  He just didn’t happen to be looking down in that crucial second before he reached the hole.

In Japan, chewing gum while walking is considered to much diversion of attention.

However, do you think if she didn’t see the open manhole cover, that she would have seen cones?

However, do you think if she didn’t see the open manhole cover, that she would have seen cones?

Well, yeah?  Because cones are a physical thing that stick up out of the ground and are easily noticeable in your peripheral vision (what with that bright fluorescent orange color and all) while an open manhole cover is not so much on either count.

It’s actually pretty easy to miss an open manhole even if you’re not distracted by texting or chatting on a cell phone or listening to headphones or in some other way distracted.  I once almost fell into an open grate on a sidewalk because I’d walked along that piece of sidewalk thousands of times and the grate had never been open before - I was so used to the route that it wasn’t until I was right up on the grate that I realized it was open.  It happens - other distractions don’t help but being “too comfortable” with the route probably leads to more accidents than the distractions do.

“She’s all scraped up on her back, under her arms and her shoulders,”

So why is this even a news story, and why does anyone care?  Is it just about some moralizing about the evils of technology?  It was an accident caused by being distracted, which certainly doesn’t require cell phones to happen.  Of course people shouldn’t text while driving, but this story isn’t relevant, especially since the person it happened to isn’t even old enough to drive.  People do things while walking that they wouldn’t do while driving.  I think we’re making too big a deal out of this.

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger.
Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

Get back to me when the kid dies. Otherwise, this is just a chuckle.

This is the entry title of the day.  For sure.

I’m feeling pretty bad for the girl, obviously a lack of cones is much more to blame than her or her phone.  Yet I have this cartoon image of someone falling in a hole that is making me giggle unstoppably.  Bad person?  Maybe.

I walked into a parking meter once.

I was holding hands and talking to a cute boy, however.  Still hurt.

chicago has big fence-y barricade-y things they put around the manhole before they open it up.  That, plus the van parked next to the manhole, would have prevented the accident here.

This seems to have less to do with texting and more to do with people opening large holes in the sidewalk where people expect solid ground to be.  I would be less than amused if I plunged into the sewer while window shopping, people watching, looking at the clouds, reading a map, talking to a friend, or really anything other than staring at the pavement to make sure it didn’t open up under my feet.  That’s not supposed to happen.

If there were cones close enough to grab, they were close enough to see.

But I can’t help thinking about a friend’s Peace Corps stories from one of the former soviet republics, where missing manhole covers (stolen for scrap metal) were a significant cause of mortality (no money to keep streetlights in repair either).

As the late great Molly Ivins said, “My mama might have raised a mean child, but she didn’t raise any hypocrites.” 

This just will not stop being funny.

“Teen falls into manhole”

Well, that’s one down, and, what, another billion or so to go?

This version says that the workmen went to go get the cones after they opened the manhole.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31853449/?GT1=43001

If there’s a lesson everyone can learn from this it’s SAFETY FIRST.

No, the lesson to learn is “dig sewer tunnels 10 feet deeper.”

Ha, I kill me.

Triplanetary, sounds like somebody didn’t follow procedure.  Cones first, then hole!

FWIW, when I started as a day janitor at a supermarket, the boss called me “The quarter-million dollar man”, as this was the amount a previous store had to pay out in one year from what are known in the trade as “slip n’ fall” until he was put in charge of it as the store manager. Where there’s something wet on a smooth floor, a customer walks onto or through it unknowingly and proceed to have a unexpected encounter with a hard, concrete floor, and a future consultation with a lawyer to sue the store for carelessness.

Rule one whenever there was a spill or liquid on a floor for one reason or another, that whoever discovered it would keep it under observation and get another employee to get me to clean up, and I would of course arrange orange floor cones around the wet spot after cleaning up the spill that would only be removed when the spot dried out.

30

Triplanetary:  For its part, the Department of Environmental Protection said its workers had turned away briefly to grab some cones when the incident occurred.

They should be fired too:  more than one acquaintance of mine has had her cones grabbed while walking down a New York street, and women ought to be able to go outside without fearing that’ll happen to them.

denelian, the 30 is an old telgraphers’ code for the end of a transmission.  Hope that helps