Getting out on the road again

Getting out on the road again


Danel Carey

“WHAT did you get for 22 across?” the man shouted into his mobile phone. He was doing a newspaper crossword, and the fact that he was travelling on a bus wasn’t going to prevent him from finishing it.
Mercifully, the completion of crosswords on buses is generally confined to passengers rather than drivers. I was reminded how fortunate this is when reading about Merv Grazinski, who crashed on his way home from an Oklahoma University football game. Grazinski had purchased a brand new Winnebago motor home, and having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 miles per hour and calmly left the driver’s seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the vehicle left the freeway, crashed and overturned.
Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner’s manual that he could not actually do this. A jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago motor home. The company actually changed its manuals on the basis of  this lawsuit. Sadly, the story is apparently an urban legend. Still, it’s a great yarn.
Another motor-related misunderstanding led The Sun to run a story entitled ‘Everyone off my bus, I need to pray’. The article suggested that Arunas Raulynaitis, a London bus driver and a Muslim, asked passengers to leave his bus so he could pray, and that passengers later refused to re-board the bus because they saw a rucksack which made them think he might be a fanatic. The article included pictures of Mr Raulynaitis praying.
The Sun subsequently accepted that these allegations were completely untrue. “Mr Raulynaitis is not a fanatic and he did not ask passengers to leave his bus to allow him to pray,” its apology read. “In fact, he was praying during his statutory rest break. We apologise to Mr Raulynaitis for the embarrassment and distress caused.”
Another man who experienced automotive distress was former Republic of Ireland soccer international Niall Quinn – though in his case, it was the least of his troubles. The current Sunderland chairman gambled a lot in his younger days, and once found himself down to his last tenner after a day at Ascot racecourse. There was only one race left: a maiden hurdle with 31 runners. Quinn ‘fell back on science’ to save himself, doing a reverse forecast bet using the number of his flat (six) and the number of his door in London (20).
He had already handed over the money when his companion Paul Merson realised the ticket had the wrong numbers. Instead of horses six and 20, he’d been given six and 27. So Quinn queued again and got it changed. “You can guess the rest,” the Dubliner recalled in his autobiography. “Six beats 27 for first. They come home at 100-1 and 66-1 respectively. My tenner would have become £25,000. When we got back to the car, we found I’d left the lights on all day and it wouldn’t start.”
Only Quinn could laugh after misfortune like that. But similar experiences happen to most of us at some stage in our lives.