Man has beef with White Castle over chairs

Here in the U.S. we're an incredibly litigious group of people. In simpler words, people will sue for anything.

There are lawsuits over land disputes, child custody, wills, divorces, and basically anything that would result in an argument between two or more people.

And now, add this to the list: a 64 year old man sticking it to White Castle. Why? At 290 pounds, the plaintiff is arguing that his inability to fit into the small seats is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

He claims that this complaint is not only raised on his behalf, but also for pregnant women and others who may have similar seating issues.

We know all of the pregnant women out there are outraged at the size of White Castle's seats, considering how popular of an eatery it is for those expecting a new baby.

Now I'm going to try to hold off on the insensitive comments for a few minutes to actually evaluate this man's argument. The law is a funny thing; it's often able to bend and twist in ways to compensate for situations that you would never think possible. Is that the case here?

Let's first take a look at what the Americans with Disabilities Acts defines as a "disability": "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual".

Okay, so this man does have a physical impairment that limits him. The Act even goes as far as to define major life activities as including "… but not limited to, caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working." While it's not explicitly listed in the act, I would venture to guess that sitting would also be considered a major life activity if standing and bending make the list. Unnerving as it may be, it looks like Mr. Kessman may have a valid argument on his hands.

However, now I'm going to switch back into the mode of a human being and evaluate his argument in a more common fashion: Seriously? I don't want to cross the line of honest to insensitive, but how small can those seats be?

I have to admit that I don't often go to White Castle, but something tells me that they're not using age 5-7 tea party seats from K-mart to seat their customers.

It's White Castle. You know what the first thing on the menu is when you pull the menu? It's a humble choice for one person (one in this case I'm assuming to mean four) that includes four hamburgers, a medium fry, and a small drink. Maybe Kessman has a point. But now the problem is finding a company that manufactures seats with 60 inches of cushion space. Anybody?

Bottom line: the dude will probably succeed in getting White Castle to put in bigger butt pillows, if only because their legal team doesn't feel like dishing out the money to appease similar lawsuits in the future.

But is that really the solution? American's the most obese country in the world; has anyone thought that this may be caused by our logic that if a restaurant's seat sizes are too small that we should make them bigger as opposed to making our bodies maybe a tiny bit smaller?

Well anyway, good luck Mr. Kessman, in your epic journey to achieve bigger seat size. May the force be with you?