Imagine that you are repairing a roof and all of a sudden you are assaulted by ants. As you are trying to defend yourself, the rotting roof gives out, and you plummet through it.
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While you are at the hospital, the nurses take your blood and collects a urine sample. This is usually customary when you get hurt on the jobsite, but what isn’t customary is being three sheets to the wind.
In spot-on Strange But True fashion, this actually happened! A worker in Kansas had been drinking on the job when he fell through the roof of a house he was repairing. He blamed falling off the roof on ants, but the doctor and his employer both blamed it on him being drunk.
However, when the employer tried to have his worker’s comp benefits terminated, a judge ruled in the man’s favor. According the court document, the judge denied the benefits because of two things.
First, there was no official chain of command in administering the drug and alcohol tests, so the employer could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the tests actually belonged to the man. The person who testified about the drug testing was just a lab supervisor—she wasn’t the one who administered the test, nor did she know who did. The judge ruled that because the person who did the testing wasn’t in the courtroom to testify, that the blood and urine samples could have easily belonged to someone else.
Second, the employer failed to prove that the man’s drinking had anything to do with him falling through the roof. The employer used the doctor’s testimony as his evidence for being intoxicated. But the judge ruled this evidence was invalid because in the doctor’s written report, he stated that the man fell off the roof, not through it. This contradicted what the man said had happened.
So basically, it doesn’t matter whether the worker was drunk! If there isn’t any solid evidence for terminating the worker’s comp benefits, perhaps innocent ants will get the blame in the end!