Folly of the DayCity Banking Solicitor Insures His Bicycle Immediately After It Is Stolen, Then Explains to the Tribunal That He Believed the Policy Covered Any Bicycle At All
A man whose working life consisted of reading the exact words of contracts drafted for institutions that lend hundreds of millions decided that his own contract, alone among all contracts on earth, meant whatever was most convenient to him on the afternoon he needed it to. The profession does not require its members to be honest because honesty is beautiful; it requires it because a solicitor's word is the only thing the whole apparatus rests on, and it is worth rather more than a bicycle. He learned the exchange rate: one bicycle, one career, £20,757 in costs, and a permanent entry on a register he will now be reading about in other people's files.
Source: RollOnFriday
The WireRegulator Rules That a Yellow Oval Cartoon Is, in Law, a Peanut
Somewhere in a building in London, adults in possession of degrees reasoned their way, in writing, to the finding that ovalness plus yellowness constitutes a legume — while the corporation opposite paid other adults to argue that the shape was merely evocative. Both sides believed themselves to be doing serious work. This is what a mature regulatory culture looks like once it has run out of genuine hazards and must begin manufacturing them, and the only honest verdict is that the confectioner and the regulator deserve each other precisely.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
The WireFirm Already Served a Prohibition Notice for Unsafe Scaffolding Wraps a Badly Built Tower in Sheeting, Inventing a Sail, on a Busy High Street
The state had already told this firm, on paper, that it did not know how to build scaffolding; the firm's answer was to build some more and then improve it by attaching a sail. Competence is not a possession a man acquires by doing something for years — it is a thing he can only demonstrate, and the prohibition notice was the demonstration, in writing, that he could not. He read it as an insult rather than as information, which is the entire difference between a professional and a man in a professional's clothing.
Source: Health and Safety Executive
Black-Robed EgomaniaJudge Uses a Criminal Hearing to Air His Own Views on the Allegations, and Separately Invokes His Judicial Title at Wildlife Officers About to Ticket Him for a Boating Violation
The presumption of innocence is the one thing a judge is issued that he did not earn and cannot improve upon, and this one spent it from the bench to tell a courtroom what he personally thought — then, out on the water, produced the title again to see whether it worked on a game warden. That is the same act twice: a man who has confused the office he occupies with the person occupying it, and who therefore assumes the robe travels with him, sits in his boat, and speaks in his voice. It does not. It stayed in the courtroom, where somebody else will be wearing it for the next ninety days.
Source: Colorado Politics
LazyTownSolicitor of Thirty-Seven Years' Standing Takes Client Cash Straight into His Own Bank Account Rather Than Do the Paperwork That Makes Him a Solicitor
Every protection he could not be bothered to construct — the letter, the receipt, the authorised firm, the box on the form — existed to shield him quite as much as the client, and each would have cost him about ten minutes. He saved perhaps an hour across fifteen months and paid for it with a career begun when Margaret Thatcher was in office. Laziness at this altitude is not fatigue; it is the settled conviction that the paperwork is scaffolding for lesser men, and that he personally could hold the structure up by simply being himself.
Source: The Law Society Gazette
Campus WatchUniversity Compels First-Years into Courses Whose Published Descriptions Decline to Say What Is in Them
An institution charging tens of thousands a year to teach the young how to read a text critically has issued course descriptions that cannot themselves be read critically, because they do not say anything — and has made the courses compulsory, which conveniently removes any need for them to. The tell is not the subject matter; it is the vagueness. A department confident that its offering would survive description describes it.
Source: Campus Reform