Will someone please help me sue the law school?

Go to any library on the UWO campus save the law school's, and near closing, you will hear a shrill tone followed by a public address indicating that the library will soon be closing for the night. Go to the law library at about the same time, and something completely different will happen.

You'd figure that being a library filled with books on what does and does not constitute irresponsible and tortious behaviour, the law library would get the closing ritual right (like all the other libraries) and not do anything that would create a potential liability in tort. Instead, the law library not only does something that carries the potential for an action in tort...it does something that begs for someone to sue them and here's what it is: Without any warning whatsoever, all the lights in the library go out at once and they stay off for about 10 seconds.

Hopefully, I'm not the only one who sees the risk here. Imagine someone who is walking in the stack stairwells (no windows in there) or even down the main lower-level stairs at night. Now picture them falling to their severe injury and/or death in darkness. No real stretch of the imagination there.

Perhaps the risk wouldn't be so bad if the library staff were to only flick the lights off briefly and turn them back on right away. That would be a slightly safer way to get across the message that the library is about to close. The full 10 second outage however, is just asking for trouble. Look at it this way: If someone is thick enough to need a full 10 seconds of darkness to figure out what is going on, then they would probably also be a likely candidate for continuing on their merry way without sight until they go bouncing down the stairs not so merrily. (Such a person would also be a likely candidate for having to wear a helmet everywhere, but since the law library apparently thinks that this means everyone who steps into its domain, I find such a suggestion highly distasteful.)

Since the law library is just begging for this to happen (and since I want to feel smarter than someone who should have to wear a helmet 24-7,) I am looking for volunteers to help me sue the law school in tort.* The plan is simple: I will need someone to wait at the bottom of the stairs just as the lights are about to go out. I will also need someone waiting with a chair-in-hand at the top of the stairs at the same time. I will wait at the bottom of the stairs with the aforementioned person. When the lights go out, the person at the top will hurl the chair down the stairs and the ensuing racket will hopefully sound good enough to pass for the sound of someone falling down the stairs. To complement this sound, I will shriek and scream and then proceed to lay myself out on the floor at the bottom of the stairs in mangled fashion and feign agony while the other person at the bottom makes sure that all the broken pieces of chair are removed from view. The person at the top of the stairs can also help with clean up by running down the stairs (carefully, I hope) to make sure that there isn't any debris left on any of the stairs.

I will sue the law school for one meelion dollars.

*If you have not yet concluded that this post is merely a joke and think that I actually mean to do this, then you need to put a helmet on...NOW!