When to consider a compensation claim

This post is sponsored by Firths the Compensation Lawyers.  

So the other day I was in Coles, rushing around trying to do all my groceries in record speed between a toddler ballet lesson, sleep time and school pick up.  With ‘said’ toddler in the troller who did not want to be in the trolley, if you know what I’m saying?  Anyway, it was not really a day where I had time to stop and chat.

I obviously didn’t look busy or flustered enough because an elderly gentleman stopped me in the aisle and decided to tell me his whole life story.  I mean ALL of it.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that quite frankly I did have time for this, so I just smiled, nodded and listened and smiled, nodded and listened some more.

After he’d finished telling me about his life (which was quite fascinating really), he then went on to tell me that I looked like a wonderful mother (bless his cottons).  The conversation then turned to his current legal battle (well sort of legal battle) with one of the supermarket chains. He had recently bought a jar of ‘something’ and when he’s got home and used it, he’d found some loose glass inside it that had cut his mouth.  The poor man was so worried (and rightly so) that someone else might buy this jar of ‘something’ and get cut even worse than he did, and god forbid it could be a child.  He really felt he deserved some kind of compensation, even if it was just an apology from the store.

I admired his persistence for what he believed was right.  I wondered if I would have done the same in that same situation?

It reminded me of the time that Josh got burnt at his pre-school in England a few years ago.  He was only just 4 years old.  I had gone to work that morning as usual, and our lovely nanny Soph had dropped him at pre-school before taking Hollie to the park.  She got a phone call later that morning asking her to come and pick him up as he had a small burn on his tummy from the radiator (room heater).

She got to the pre-school, took one look at his tummy and decided to step outside and call me.  “Josh has been burnt on his tummy” she told me “and the school thinks I should take him to the GP just in case.”  “Oh, how bad is it? “I asked her.  “Really bad” she said, “I think I should take him straight to Accident and Emergency and you should meet me there!”

I rushed out of work, straight to the hospital, all the time wondering how a radiator could cause such a bad burn.  I was horrified when I got there and saw it.  It was red raw and about 10cm across his stomach, with no dressing on it al all. The doctors in the hospital asked me A LOT of questions about how and where and why it had happened as they had to write a report on these kinds of accidents.

It turned out that the radiator was metal with no cover over it, which is actually illegal.  Josh was fine in the end, and the pre-school promised to have the radiator properly fixed and covered.

That was as far as I took the situation.  Should I have taken it further?  I often wonder, even though it’s way to late now.

Would you consider getting compensation from an accidental situation?