New Hampshire workers' comp is not supposed to be a blame game.

That is the first thing to get straight.

If a school janitor slips on chemicals another employee left out in a hallway, closet, loading area, or wax room, the basic question is not, "Whose fault was it?" The basic question is whether the injury arose out of and in the course of the job.

Usually, if you were on the clock, doing school custodial work, and went down because someone left cleaning chemicals, stripper, degreaser, or floor finish where they should not have been, that points toward coverage.

But this is where it gets ugly.

The district, its third-party administrator, or the carrier may still try to turn your own conduct into the reason to deny or reduce the claim in practical terms, even if they do not use the words "comparative negligence" the way they would in a car crash on I-93 or Route 101. In a workers' comp file, they often dress it up differently. They say you ignored an obvious hazard. They say you violated training. They say you took a shortcut. They say the spill was open and obvious. They say you were wearing the wrong footwear. They say you were rushing because school was about to start and kids were coming through. Same accusation, different label: this was your fault.

"I walked past it twice" is not the killer fact they want you to think it is

At a school, janitors and custodians are constantly moving.

You go from cafeteria to restroom to boiler room to entryway. You double back for pads, keys, salt, mop heads, trash liners, a floor machine battery, whatever the day is throwing at you. If there was a chemical container, residue, or slick spot left out by another employee, the fact that you passed that area earlier does not automatically mean you "accepted the risk" or caused your own injury.

People notice hazards imperfectly.

Especially at the end of a shift, during a snow-slosh week in March, or when you are juggling radio calls, student traffic, and wet floors from sand and melt. Anyone who has watched school maintenance crews in Concord, Manchester, or Rochester in late winter knows how fast conditions change. One minute it is tracked-in slush. Next minute it is cleanser or wax where it should not be.

The other side loves the argument that the spill was obvious because it sounds like common sense. Juries like common sense. Adjusters like common sense. Supervisors definitely like common sense when it helps them dodge responsibility.

But "you should have seen it" is not the same thing as "your claim is barred."

Comparative negligence is a real issue in injury cases, but workers' comp works differently

If you were suing a negligent third party in New Hampshire, fault percentages would matter a lot. Shared blame can absolutely change the value of a case.

Workers' comp is a different animal.

It is generally built for on-the-job injuries without having to prove the employer was negligent. That also means the employer usually cannot escape just by saying you were partly careless. Ordinary negligence by the worker is usually not enough.

That does not mean the employer has no defense.

What they may argue instead is:

• you were not doing your job when you fell
• you knowingly violated a clear safety rule
• you were horseing around
• you were impaired
• the condition was personal to you, not work-related
• your knee, hip, or back problem was already bad and the fall changed nothing

That last one matters a lot for a 58-year-old custodian close to retirement.

Because once they see age, prior aches, or any old MRI, the argument shifts fast. Suddenly it is not about the chemicals on the floor. Now it is, "He was already on the way out anyway."

That is the technicality-style defense people never see coming.

The real fight is often over causation, not fault

If you slipped hard enough to wrench your shoulder, tear a meniscus, aggravate your low back, or bang your head, the district may still pay some initial treatment and then draw a line.

They may say the fall happened, sure, but your current inability to work is really because of degeneration, arthritis, diabetes, prior surgeries, or balance issues.

For a school janitor nearing retirement, that can be devastating. Not just financially. Psychologically.

Because the system starts acting like decades of physical work in old buildings, carrying salt buckets, stripping floors, and climbing ladders around a school somehow count against you. As if the body wear from doing the job means the job gets less responsibility when one more incident finally drops you.

In plain English: they may not win by saying the spill was your fault. So they pivot and say your body was the problem all along.

"Open and obvious" is more powerful in premises cases than in comp cases

People hear "open and obvious" and panic.

That phrase comes up all the time in slip-and-fall law. In a public liability case, if somebody falls at a store or on private property, the property owner may argue the condition was so obvious that the injured person should have avoided it.

In a workers' comp claim, that argument has less clean force.

A custodian is not a random visitor. A custodian works in the mess. You are expected to be around cleaning supplies, wet areas, maintenance zones, and half-finished tasks left by other staff. Schools are not sterile office suites. They are living workplaces, and a lot of them in New Hampshire are older buildings with cramped storage and bad handoff practices between shifts.

So if the district says, "He saw the chemicals and kept walking there anyway," the answer is not automatically game over.

The sharper question is whether the risk was part of the work environment and whether your injury flowed from that work exposure.

What hurts your claim most

Not age.

Not the fact that you were trying to keep the school running.

What hurts most is when your own first report makes it sound like nothing happened, or you give them a vague version because you do not want to cause trouble for a coworker.

That is how a straightforward school chemical slip turns into, "unclear mechanism of injury," "no witness saw the fall," or "employee reported soreness later."

And once that happens, the "your fault" narrative gets teeth.

If the record says only that you "felt pain while working," they have room to argue all day about whether there was any actual incident, whether you misstepped on your own, whether the floor was simply wet from normal conditions, or whether your knee gave out before you ever touched the spill.

That is the part people can't believe. The case doesn't get gutted because you were reckless. It gets gutted because the paperwork leaves just enough room for them to pretend they're not sure what happened.

If they say you caused it, look at what they are really trying to prove

Usually it is one of three things.

First, they want to frame the fall as a personal mistake instead of a job hazard.

Second, they want to weaken the medical link between the fall and the injury.

Third, they want to box you into early retirement by making the claim feel too disputed, too tiring, too uncertain to keep pushing.

That tactic lands especially hard in school jobs, where people have long service, modest savings, and bodies that already show years of wear.

So can they really deny your New Hampshire workers' comp claim because you walked past the spill twice?

On that fact alone, no, not cleanly.

But they can absolutely try to build a denial around the idea that the hazard was obvious, your conduct was unreasonable, and your medical problems were mostly preexisting. That is the other side's argument. Not just "you should have seen it," but "this fall did not truly take away your ability to keep working."

And that is the fight. Not the dramatic one people expect. The technical one that can cost a 58-year-old school custodian his last working years if nobody calls it what it is.