Thanks For Ruining It For Everyone

Years ago, I was working on a movie set. Every Friday, after we finished filming for the week, our Craft Service team would head to the down-on-their-luck part of town and hand out the perishable food that would not make it through the weekend. It wasn’t a lot of food, but it would help twenty to thirty people a week.

One Monday, our production office got a call from a man who’d received food from the truck the week before, complaining that what he got was moldy (I very much doubt that it was) and he “wanted his money back”. When his demand was refused (what he’d gotten was free) he started to threaten to sue the company for endangering his life.

This went all the way up to our parent company through various legal departments to our huge American movie studio and they freaked out about the threat of legal action.

Craft Service was forbidden from handing out food ever again, and they had to throw out the leftovers from then on.