Woman's skull not crushed in perfectly safe Dunedin shopping mall.
A woman was not even slightly injured after not being hit by falling fibre dust at popular Dunedin shopping mall The Meridian, despite receiving what a witness described as a “negligible sized piece of plastic on her table”.
Critic’s journalistic panties were quickly moistened last Thursday, September 1st, after an excitable student informed Critic that a woman had been hit in the head and killed by falling masonry in the Meridian food court. Rushing to beat the ODT to the story Critic concocted numerous sensationalist headlines to cover all possible permutations of fast food the woman might have been eating when she suffered the fatal blow.
However Critic’s dream of running the headline “All she wanted was a wanton!” was shattered, after a call to the Meridian revealed that the entire story was an exaggeration of epic proportions.
The Meridian authorities told Critic that in reality a contractor had scraped the roof whilst carrying a ladder on an escalator, in the process dislodging a small piece of polystyrene, which fell on the woman’s table while she was enjoying lunch. The woman was not even injured a little bit, and was in fact the winner on the day, as she was offered a free meal of her choice to compensate her for the slightly startling experience.
Critic could not confirm what type of food court wares the woman had been snacking on when the incident occurred, but did discover that the contractor responsible for the slop-up had been “banned from carrying ladders”. How this ban would affect the man’s future employment options was unclear, although sources within Critic speculated that the ban would probably not be as much of a career limiting factor as killing someone on the job.