By Pat Murphy
The Daily Record Newswire
Ya gotta love those wacky guys working for the Xenia Rural Water District. Do they know how to have a great time or what?
Talk about funny? Pleease! Let those guys get started and you’ll be busting a gut.
Of course, their unique brand of merriment may lead to a few bumps and bruises. But what the heck, that’s what workers’ compensation is for, right?
The Xenia Rural Water District installs water lines in rural Iowa. The work can be back-breaking, but that doesn’t mean that the District’s employees don’t know how to break up the monotony.
Norman Vegors, who worked for the District, claims that he and a coworker commonly acknowledged each other by waving the boom of a track hoe.
Hey, what better way to lighten things up than by having 20 tons of construction equipment careening around the job site? Zany!
Then there are the butt wiggles.
Say you’re walking across a job site. You want to wave to a friend, but your hands are full. According to Norman, the clever, irreverent thing to do is to wiggle your butt at your pal.
Those guys!
Of course, there can be a price to pay for really great comedy. Norman discovered this truth the hard way.
One day Norman spied a coworker, Casey Byrd, approaching in a pickup truck. Norman gave Casey a good old butt wiggle and, to spice things up, he presented his posterior by leaning over the bed of his own truck.
Casey took this irresistible bait and attempted to bump Norman’s booty with his side mirror as he drove by.
Unfortunately, Casey passed a smidgen too close and hit Norman with his pickup.
No worries! Norman would be right as rain once his injuries healed and the workers’ compensation checks started arriving in the mail.
But then some sour puss of a state judge decided that Norman wasn’t entitled to benefits because he was engaged in “horseplay” at the time of his injuries. Boo hoo!
Coming to the rescue was the Iowa Supreme Court, whose justices obviously have an elevated sense of comedy.
While the District argued that Norman was ineligible for benefits because he had suffered a “wilfull injury,” the state high court decided that the employee should have his day in court to prove that he did not substantially deviate from the course of employment.
“It cannot be determined as a matter of law that [Norman] voluntarily instigated or aggressively participated in horseplay to an extent that prevents compensation. There is evidence in the record that the horseplay was initiated only by [Casey] or that any action by [Norman] was an insubstantial deviation from his employment,” the court said.
As to Norman waving his posterior in Casey’s direction, the court said that the “butt wiggle considered in isolation could be thought a ‘harmless act of levity.’” (Xenia Rural Water District v. Vegors)
