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Laziness, drunkenness and student compensation claims
Now that may or may not sound familiar to you. If it doesn't then you probably haven't spent three years of your life dossing about at university. And if it does, you tax-dodging student layabout, then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not having a go. I don't resent paying my taxes for you to sit on your backside doing nothing all day and I don't mind that I have to pay full-price for the cinema while you produce some tattered bit of card and get in for half the amount.
Well, I might be having a go, but that's because I'm actually just jealous. I did it, I lived the student dream, and having now spent four years in the big wide world of work I wish I could go back to the days of lie-ins, Trisha and cheap cider (not all at once of course, though I imagine that could be quite interesting).
But I don't quite want all of it back thank you very much, oh no.
My life of laziness and debauched revelry did need funding and, in addition to the mass of overdrafts and loans that I took out (and am still paying back at some obscene rate of interest), I spent my holidays slaving away for a pittance. And university holidays are long.
I did some truly awful jobs back in the day. I worked on a sewage farm, I fed faulty plastic milk bottles into a rubbish shoot, I cleaned up vomit on cross-channel ferries and I even spent days wandering the streets dressed as a giant piece of cheese.
Luckily I didn't suffer any personal injuries during my skint student holidays and I was so desperate for the pittance that I was earning that I probably wouldn't have considered making a compensation claim even if I did.
There's the problem. I doubt I'm the only one who has found myself in that situation, not wanting to kick up a fuss for fear of losing a job. But that's wrong and many employers take advantage, not providing a safe working environment and exposing their staff to workplace accidents safe in the knowledge that there are thousands of other equally desperate students who would snap up the job in an instant.
They might not pay tax and, if rumour is true, they might not wash as often as they should, yet they still have rights. As I've already mentioned, however, some employers are only too aware of the huge pool of wannabe workers and so neglect the wellbeing of those already in their pay.
Bosses of such wanton disregard have kept newspaper editors rubbing their hands with glee over the past few years and the headlines have been full of stories of students injured or even killed in work accidents whilst grafting away during their holidays.
Justifiably, many of these workplace injuries and deaths have resulted in compensation claims but too many students, and indeed workers from all sections of society, are still unaware of their rights.
Being a poor student with an expensive alcohol and takeaway addiction to fuel often means having to do the jobs that nobody else wants to do. Wandering around dressed as an oversized slice of cheddar and spending time ankle deep in other people's excrement was my experience of this and I definitely wasn't the only student to have scraped a living in such a way.
I had a friend who subsidised his diet of Pot Noodles by regularly posing in the buff at a nearby art college, another volunteered' himself for medical research at a local hospital and another even tried (unsuccessfully) to sell his soul on eBay.
Apart from some sort of nasty accident involving paintbrushes or an internet-related incident concerning psychotic web geeks, the former and latter are highly unlikely to result in personal injury and the need for compensation claims.
The middle one, however, has a very real risk of something going wrong and should definitely not be entered into lightly. The poor individual who was dubbed The Elephant Man' by the media last year after his medical testing experience took a turn for the worst would surely pay testament to the huge dangers of using one's body as a guinea pig.
But students, being students, often can't resist the lure of some easy cash. In fact, the friend who spent a week in hospital having some sort of anti-obesity drug tested on his already skinny body claimed that it was the best seven days he could remember. He got fed and watered, was woken up by pretty nurses and spent his days watching Sky Sports, all in exchange for a few syringes of his blood and a couple of pots of his pee every day.
Despite the risk of suffering dangerous complications and then having to make a personal injury compensation claim, this medical testing thing sounded quite tempting. For some reason or another I never went ahead with it and, looking back at what happened last year, I'm quite glad I didn't.
Even as I sit here at my desk right now (half past nine on a Wednesday morning), wishing that I was still lying in my old halls of residence bed with another few hours before I have to get up, there are probably poor students not too far away who are sat in clinics and having drugs pumped into them for the advancement of medical science.
No doubt, not too far away, there are also skint undergraduates already out of bed, complaining about the early morning and wandering around a shopping centre, hungover and starving, dressed as a bottle of ketchup or a box of cereal.
I guess it's all part of student life and with so many pros to spending three years at uni there have got to be a few cons too. Just make sure that, no matter how degrading or boring the job is, you're safety isn't going to be compromised because, even with all that sleeping, partying, drinking, oh and of course learning to do, you should always have the time to pick up the phone and make a personal injury compensation claim.
This article may be published on another website free of charge, on the condition that a link is provided from this article to our website: http://www.youclaim.co.uk/work-accident-compensation-young-people-making-claims.htm
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Katrina Eadie, YouClaim are the leading online personal injury compensation claim people with a 97% claim success rate. Call 0800 10 757 95 or visit http://www.youclaim.co.uk/work-accident-compensation-young-people-making-claims.htm
for more details.
