TGI Friday’s has recently started a new advertising promotion in which a drone, propelled by four sharp blades that do not have guards on them, flies around its restaurants with a mistletoe attached to its undercarriage, hovering over its patrons heads in order to get them to kiss.
We know what you’re thinking: what could possibly go wrong?
It turns out that having a whirling, manually controlled robot with four unguarded blades beneath it whizzing around above customers’ heads is a bad idea, as an unfortunate woman discovered when one crashed into her, cutting open her nose.
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Photojournalist Georgine Benvenuto attended an event at the TGI Friday’s in New York that was held in order to showcase the drones, and wound up bloodied after one of the drones came too close for comfort. By “too close for comfort” we mean “hit her in the head.”
Speaking to Brooklyn Daily, Benvenuto said: “I’ve done some crime scene reporting. I survived 9/11. I didn’t get a scratch on any of those assignments. This is bizarre to go into a restaurant and come out injured.”
In another conversation with NYMag (a lot of people wanted to hear her side of the story, apparently, Benvenuto claimed that the drone’s operator was attempting to land it on a reporter’s hand in order to demonstrate the tech, saying: “It kind of landed, but it did something to her hand — I don’t know whether it was buzzing or what — but she flinched. And when she flinched, I was standing maybe a foot away from her, and this smaller toy drone for children flies into my face at that point.
“It was like I couldn’t get it off because I guess the mistletoe part had fishing wire on it — that’s how it was attached — and it got caught in my hair and it kept twirling and twirling and twirling while this thing is on my nose.”
She added: “That’s how it ended up cutting me under the chin, I think it had four blades.”
Indoor drones are required to have guards attached to the blades in order to prevent injury, though apparently TGI Friday’s overlooked this little instruction in the manual because nothing’s more festive than a blade up your nose and mistletoe in your hair.
The restaurant declined to comment on the injury, with reports stating that they also dismissed concerns about future issues with deploying these mistletoe-carrying harbingers of doom in their establishments.
