Getting up in the morning sometimes seems like a bad idea.
You might scare yourself when you first look in the mirror, choke on mouthwash, cut yourself shaving, slip on a bar of soap in the shower, pinch yourself while zipping up, bump your head while trying to find your shoes, trip over the laces and fall down the stairs, overfill your coffee cup and scald yourself, then open the front door and get smacked in the forehead by an airborne newspaper.
If that's how your day starts, you might think you'd have been better off staying in bed -- were it not for the risk of muscular atrophy.
Life is full of hazards. If we're not completely obtuse, we learn from experience to pay attention, exercise caution, and anticipate obstacles and pitfalls.
Some of life's hazards clearly are marked; some aren't. Road signs warn us of blind curves, low shoulders, and falling rocks. Highway departments seem to think the warnings suffice until they can straighten the curves, raise the shoulders, and remove the rocks.
Golf courses also identify hazards, but not all of them apparently.
As reported recently in The Record, Patricia C. Manns filed suit against the Greenhills Country Club in Ravenswood -- more than two years after allegedly suffering an injury while negotiating a set of steps leading to the tee box on the sixth hole.
Mrs. Manns doesn't specify what it was that made the steps hazardous. Steps can be inherently dangerous with or without handrails. Steps go both up and down. Steps can be wide or narrow, high or low. Sometimes the width and height vary from step to step.
Should Greenhills Country Club have posted a warning sign reading "Steps" with translations in various languages and a graphic representation of steps for the literate-challenged?
Was Mrs. Manns distracted by the natural beauty of the course (another hazard)? Was she engrossed in conversation with her partner, or talking or texting on a cell phone? We don't know.
Could it be that Patricia Manns simply is looking for some green, for a personal-injury hole-in-one?
That would be par for the plaintiff bar course. Let's hope the court scores it a bogey.
