Restaurant Manager Sues For $1 Million, Claiming He Was Bit By Venomous Spider

Spiders just don't belong around food, okay? The last thing we want to see when we sit down for a meal is an eight-legged creepy-crawler, causing us to scream and upturn our plate in our collective lap. Because usually when spiders show up around dining tables, bad things happen. Recently we wrote about the nightmare instance of giant Australian spiders that some benevolent children invited for breakfast. Now a restaurant manager at a high-end steakhouse in Portland, Oregon is suing for $999,999 (so, a million dollars) after saying that he was bitten by what he believes was a venomous brown recluse spider.

The manager at McCormick & Schmick's Harborside had been complaining for a month to a contracted pest control company about spiders on the restaurant's outdoor patio. When they failed to respond, he attempted to knock out the cobwebs himself, apparently subsequently getting bitten by a suspected brown recluse spider. Oregon Live reports that the "spider that bit Clement sent him to the hospital for three days with a fever, nausea, and weakness, according to his lawsuit."

Compounding the confusion over the incident is the fact that the brown recluse is not native to Oregon, although that's not to say that the manager didn't get bitten by something terrible. The amount he's suing the pest control company for involves lost wages, medical bills, and "hundreds of thousands more for pain and suffering." Granted, he'll probably never be able to see a spider without having a heart attack ever again.