Grates are a great idea!

This is my first blog, so be kind.  : )

The other night I was watching the evening news and caught a couple of reports that peaked my interest.  One of the stories was about a little girl drowning in a local public pool because the pool's intake grate was missing.  She got pulled into the intake and being unable to free herself drowned.  That is terrible I thought to myself.   The reporter then went on to state that the grate was missing because the pool had trouble finding one that was the right size, or some kind of bogus cop out like that.

The other story was about that airliner which was masterfully crash landed on the Hudson, w/o any casualties.  What a great job by that pilot!  The only thing about this story that troubled me was that in the news report, they stated that it was believed that a couple of birds were sucked into the jet's engines thus causing the flame out.

I was really disturbed about the first story, and since I work for a manufacturing/engineering company I pitched the idea of adding a new line of products: pool grates.  I let the owners know about the new report I had caught the night before.

One of the owner's let me know that we would not want to get into to pool grate business because of its susceptibility of lawsuits.  He then proceeded to tell me about another company that makes pool grates that lost a major lawsuit.  The story goes like this, a pool man forgot to replace the intakes grate after performing some maintenance...which of course was negligent on his part.  But to add insult to injury the pool's intake pump had been grossly over sized by the designer.   As you can clearly see, it was not the fault of the grate manufacturer that the pool man forgot to reinstall it, or that the designer over sized the pump.  But loose the case they did.

The pool's owner and the designing firm settled out of court, but the poor grate manufacturer took it in the shorts. 

'That's make no sense', I stated, the grate manufacturer was not to blame because of others negligence.  So feeling a little disappointed, I  then looked at my boss and said: "How about jet engine  intake grates?"