Quote:Woman Nearly Has Her Face Destroyed By A TGI Friday's Mistletoe Drone

Caroline Moss

Dec. 8, 2014, 10:06 PM


TGI Friday's mistletoe drone.

Imagine this: You're sitting in a booth in TGI Friday's, minding your own business, thinking about which appetizer to order, when a drone covered in mistletoe comes flying at your face.

This is what happened to photojournalist Georgine Benvenuto last Thursday evening at a TGI Friday's in Brooklyn, New York.

The drone, New York Magazine reported, is "part of a TGI Fridays promotion meant 'to help inspire more guests to come together underneath the mistletoe and experience #Togethermas this Christmas.'"

Benvenuto told NYMag that she arrived at the TGI Friday's on assignment — she was to take photos of couples kissing underneath the promotional drone. She was joined by a few other writers.

The man operating the drones (there were a few) was showing "Vanessa Ogle, the Brooklyn Daily reporter writing the story, that the drone could land easily on her hand."

Here's what followed, in Benvenuto's words to NYMag:

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. That’s how it ended up cutting me under the chin, I think it had four blades. So immediately like I’m trying to get this thing off as if it was a huge bug trying to shoo it away.

"If that would've hit me in my eye, I wouldn't be working tomorrow," she adds. "If this thing continued to spin, it would've taken my eye out without a doubt."