Thursday, December 11, 2014

A Scenario

I bought a UPS at Fry's today for the new system. It was surprisingly heavy.

As I was carrying it through the parking lot, I saw the brake lights flash on a van directly to the right.

I have this strange thing I do when I'm driving or walking through parking lots where I imagine what I would do if things went bad (car X changing lanes into car Y, car pulling out into my path in a parking lot, etc.). I know--it's weird.

The van didn't pull out, and I walked past with no incident. It made me wonder, though, what would happen if the van did pull out toward me. The UPS was heavy enough where I couldn't have gotten out of the way in time to avoid being hit. My only option would have been to drop the UPS first.

So here's the puzzler scenario: if this had happened, and the UPS had been damaged, would the driver of the van have been liable for the damage? I would have dropped the UPS based on my belief that the van was going to hit me, and that dropping the UPS would allow me to move quickly enough to avoid the collision.

How do you sort through something like that?


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