My buddy DeFeyter is married to a very sweet lady, Bertha. Now Bertha does not have many bad habits (apart from her husband). One of them, however, is an addiction to pigs-in-a-blanket. This craving forces her to struggle against what might be called “dress-flation,” or the tendency for her dress sizes to increase over time. Part of her strategy in this never-ending war against pork is exercise. So she joined this exercise club for ladies (the club, for obvious reasons, shall remain nameless).
DeFeyter called me the other day to ask about it. Seems that Bertha was exiting said sweat shop and slipped on the walkway, courtesy of Old Man Winter. Fortunately Bertha was not seriously injured. However, she and DeFeyter ran up several hundred bucks in Emergency Room tests to make sure that she wasn’t. He wanted me to chase the gym for the bills.
“Well,” I asked, “did she sign a release when she joined the club?” I knew that most health-a-toriums required this. He replied that he thought that she had. After I obtained a copy from Bertha and reviewed it, I had to give them the bad news. The release was a broad as a politician’s smile and shafted the DeFeyters pretty much in the same way our esteemed Representative usually did. “Sorry,” I had to tell them, “even though the gym was careless in not cleaning their walkway, the waiver of all liability you signed releases them from everything except maybe if they pushed you to make you fall.
Needless to say, DeFeyter and his lady-wife were upset. The moral of the story is “Watch out for those curves,” I guess.
