What If?

Jeremy Vıne: whose fault is it anyway? Never mind the Olympics, the Brits' national sport should be 'avoiding blame’ - A man nearly died in my garden last week. I wasn’t there at the time, but when I heard what happened it wasn’t just images of ambulances that came to mind; I imagined what the police would have said to me if things had turned out differently…  “So this gentleman – the deceased – did you know him?”  “No. Well, yes. Sort of.” “Were you aware he was planning to erect a ladder on your kitchen roof and climb up to the third floor? Your daughter’s bedroom?”  “No.” “And yet you had paid him to clean that window. So how on earth, may I ask, did you think he was doing it?” And at that point I would have raised my hands in surrender and said: “Fair cop. My window cleaner has died and it’s all my fault.” Thank heavens, he did not die.

But the story was frightening enough. The man’s ladder had been resting on the bitumen surface of the kitchen roof. Heat had loosened the tar and the foot of the ladder suddenly slid from under him. A camera on the back of our house shows the ladder fall first, rapidly followed by the man, who travels at speed through the air, upside-down. Luckily his left leg gets caught around a rung of the ladder, which stops his head striking the concrete. He dangles like a broken puppet. After a while he gets to his feet. So there were no police, no ambulances. But I turned it over in my head. If the poor man had died, I just know I would have been responsible. I would have been responsible because it was my window, my house and my melting roof.

The list of reasons goes on. I once asked a lawyer friend what would happen if, theoretically, I blew up a paper bag and popped it behind the head of a young lady who, unbeknownst to me, had a heart condition and dropped dead. (Naturally, I would never do such a thing.) Unforeseen tragedy? “No, manslaughter,” he told me. The fact that she had a heart condition could not be used in mitigation. “You’re just as much to blame for killing a frail person as a healthy one,” he said. Clearly I would have had no chance with the window cleaner.

But where do you draw the line? A report earlier this year revealed that a nurse who slipped on a piece of potato had claimed nearly £4,000 in compensation from her hospital trust for failing to provide a safe working environment. Another worker had claimed nearly £3,000 for injuring their shoulder while throwing litter into a bin. And what about the extraordinary chain of events that took place in Augusta, Maine, a few years ago?

A woman drove her husband to the office. In addition to a goodbye kiss, she thought she’d brighten his day by flashing her breasts. Unfortunately, a passing taxi driver, Jim Vegas, glanced over. He saw the breasts and lost control at the wheel. The cab hit the Johnson Medical Building. On the first floor a dental technician was cleaning a patient’s teeth. The impact jolted her hand, she cut the patient’s gum and, in shock, he clamped his jaw shut and severed two of her fingers. Now who was responsible for that? The woman who flashed? The taxi driver?

After the 2010 election people congratulated me for “bringing down Gordon Brown” after I interviewed him about the “bigoted” pensioner Gillian Duffy on my radio show. But I don’t take any responsibility for his downfall because it was just chance that the former PM happened to insult Ms Duffy on the same day he was due to see me. The interview was simply the culmination of a series of events. The trouble is, no one likes to use the word “accident” now. As a result the avoidance of blame is a national sport. When I caught my five year-old eating chocolate from a cake I was baking after I had told her to stop, she came out with the classic line: “I’m sorry, dad, but it fell on me.”

Which is why I’m certain that, if my window cleaner had died, the police would have called, and even though I’d never met him or told him where to put his ladder, it would have been all my fault.

Guide to Home Insurance (UK) Public liability cover. Remember that you are liable for accidents to individuals working at your property and damage caused to other people’s property. For instance, if your window cleaner falls off his ladder and dies, you will need ‘public liability’ cover to cover you if you are sued. Most buildings insurance policies automatically incorporate public liability cover, but always check.

Contractor Liability (US): Are You Covered for Mishaps on Your Property? What happens if, despite all precautions, there’s an accident involving your contractor that leads to a liability issue? Who’s responsible—and who pays? Step 1: Check the personal liability section of your home owners policy. What’s typically covered: Negligence—a contractor slips on an ice walkway. Check your policy and state rules for specifics, notes Chicago-based attorney Steven J. Thayer. What’s not: Major injuries—limits are usually fairly low. Don’t trust your home owners or umbrella policies to protect you if a builder’s employee sustains major injuries. 
Also, accidents due to your gross negligence. For example, if you knew your roof was damaged and unlikely to handle the weight of a ladder and didn’t tell the contractor, a lawyer could argue that was gross negligence. Policies vary widely. Look in the personal liability section of your home owners policy for details, says Jack Smith, a spokesperson for the trade group Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of New York. The bottom line? Instead of worrying over your insurance, make sure your contractor has his own.

Not all states require this for small contractors, so ask your contractor to provide you with a policy certificate. Accidents involving the contractor’s own equipment, such as falling off a ladder. (Contractors using your ladder could claim it was your faulty equipment, not their clumsiness, leading to an insurance battle and a lawsuit. Don’t provide your contractor with anything more dangerous than a pencil.)

Window Cleaner Takes Inventories As Add-On

Pictured is Matt Strydhorst, owner of Shine Services and ProAct Inventories. He has been in business since Oct. 2009 and last year, he won the Rising Star award from the Chamber of Commerce.

Spotlight on Business: ProAct Inventories - What if you came home from work one day to find that your house had been replaced with a smoldering pile of rubble? All of your worldly possessions are gone, and on top of dealing with losing everything, you have a mountain of insurance paperwork to do. Matt Strydhorst of ProAct Inventories offers a service that can shave months off of the insurance process in the event of total loss and make sure that you will be reimbursed for everything you’ve lost.

According to Strydhorst, most people with insurance policies are underinsured. For example, if your house burns down, your insurance company will ask for an itemized list of all of your possessions and what was in the house. Strydhorst says that most people can only remember around 75% of the items in their houses and the remaining 25% remains uncovered by insurance. With Strydhorst’s new business ProAct Inventories, which is a joint venture with Jake Gour from Fairview, he will come into your home and make an itemized list of every possession in your home, complete with photos to show the current condition of the item, the current value and the replacement value of an item.

According to one insurance company, only 2% of their clients are pro-active with getting an inventory done for their homes, but it could save a lot of time and struggle for homeowners if something bad did happen. “I talked to one woman who had lost her house in a fire, and six months later she was still battling with insurance companies. “I asked her how much faster it would have gone with if she’d had a list of the things in her house, and she said that she probably would have had [the insurance process] done in two months,” says Strydhorst.

He says that most people underestimate the value of their possessions. He claims that in a regular home, there is about $10,000 - $15,000 worth of stuff in one bedroom alone. When an insurance company reimburses you for your loss, they cut you two cheques: one for the current value of your possession, factoring in depreciation, and another cheque for the difference between the current cost and the cost to replace it. If you have an itemized list of all your possessions with the replacement and current values, it will save lots of time for you in the long run. It can also protect insurance providers against insurance fraud.

According to Strydhorst, he’s always been the kind of person who would champion causes for people, and try and find solutions to problems that people didn’t even know they had. He grew up in the hamlet of La Glace and moved to Fairview to work at Fairview College in 2000. He worked there for nine years teaching the Trans Vocational program before leaving in June of 2009.

In October of that same year, he came across a great opportunity, and bought his first business, Shine Services, from its previous owner. It started off as just a window cleaning business but he has since expanded to asphalt sealcoating and crack repair, gutter cleaning, pressure washing, tree trimming and he’s even trying his hand at property management. ProAct Inventories was also a way of keeping busy in the winter.

Since sealcoating can only be done on a sunny day, and most of the other things Shine Services offers definitely cannot be done in the winter, Strydhorst needed to find something to do while there was snow on the ground. “I want to try and offer services that no one else does in the area,” says Strydhorst. It looks like Strydhorst has already filled a niche in the Peace country, as ProAct Inventories is the only company in the area who offers the service of creating an inventory of your house.

There are three different packages that he offers ranging in prices from $230 - $2000 depending on what you want done, including a videotape of all assets, cataloguing and photographing all assets over $500 or a full itemized list including photographs and serial numbers and purchase receipts of everything in your house. He can also help with estates. 

Now, if the idea of someone coming into your house and going through your things unnerves you, think about this: “I’m working hard to maintain a sense of privacy and security. It’s really important to me that my clients trust me. “I feel more weirded out than my customers sometimes, especially when it comes to more private items,” Strydhorst laughs, “But my clients don’t hide anything from me.” Besides, Strydhorst says he is not in the business of storing information. With the help of his business partner and IT guy Jake Gour, they will give you your inventory on a flash drive and 21 days after they send an invoice, they will delete the information so that hackers and thieves won’t get a hold of it.

All in all, it seems that getting an inventory done of your possessions is a good thing. Not only will it help you bring back the lifestyle that you’ve lost in the event of a loss, but it doesn’t even take that long to do. For a medium-sized house, Strydhorst says it takes him about 32 hours. “I’ve always had a dream of being an entrepreneur,” he says, “But it’s much more guts than glory.” He says it is much different than getting a paycheque every two weeks, because every sale is his own, and that’s satisfying. “The biggest reward is talking to people, and meeting people. I’ve always been a people person, but this job gives me the opportunity to meet so many great folks.”