Shuttling His Career Off A Cliff

I worked for a place that was a bit awkward because there were two different campuses and people occasionally had to shuttle between the two locations. Not everyone had a car to drive themselves between the two campuses.

So, how would a sane company handle this situation? With a regular shuttlebus, most likely, or perhaps with a designated company van and/or driver for shuttling people in between the two campuses.

How did my company handle it? By having unpaid college interns shuttle workers between the offices, in their personal vehicles, in between their other duties.

One day, the inevitable happened, and one of these college interns got into a wreck — with paid workers in his vehicle. The college intern’s BAC [blood alcohol content] was above the limit.

His insurance wouldn’t pay for the damages because he was fully at fault, and he hadn’t selected any sort of insurance to cover his own damages when he was at fault, only damages to the other vehicle and people within it.

Our workman’s comp didn’t want to pay for the injuries suffered by the workers, especially not the intern, because they thought that the automobile insurance should pay. They also didn’t want to pay because none of this was a something that would occur under reasonable circumstances, and our liaison with them was a good fast-talker who pretended that sending interns to drive people around was not normal for us.

So, the intern sued our company since he was using the vehicle for work purposes during work hours, and our company sued the intern for causing an accident due to being drunk at work, which was prohibited.

That’s around when I quit, and in my exit interview, I explained that I was leaving because of how disgusted and bothered I was by that whole situation. 

My friends who still worked there said that the company won the lawsuit against this college kid (of course they did), putting him personally on the hook for the injuries to the others in his car, as well, but that they also finally instituted a regular shuttle between the two campuses.