Folly of the DayDirector Lowers a 100kg Steel Beam on a Ratchet Strap Not Made for Lifting, Is Told by the Woman Standing Under It That It Is Not Safe, and Carries On
Note precisely where the folly sits. It is not in the strap, which was only ever a strap and never claimed otherwise; it is in a man who had, standing in front of him, free of charge, the one thing no engineering calculation can supply — a competent person telling him he was wrong. The great advantage of being the director is that nobody can make you listen. The great disadvantage of being the director is that nobody can make you listen. He was not confused and he was not unlucky; he was informed, and he preferred his own view, because a man who has spent years being the person whose decisions stand comes to experience a subordinate's objection not as information but as weather. The strap then did what straps do under a load they were not built for, on the schedule physics keeps rather than the one seniority keeps. She is still recovering. He was fined. The distance between those two sentences is the entire argument of this newspaper.
Source: Health and Safety Executive
The WireOnline Pharmacy Runs a Facebook Page Called 'UK Weight Loss Reviews' Which Independently and Favourably Reviews the Online Pharmacy That Runs It
There is a particular species of self-regard in writing the sentence 'the industry profits by keeping you subscribed' and then, in the next breath, inviting the reader to subscribe — and in believing sincerely that the reader will not notice the join. The company did not merely dress its advertising as a review site; it named the site after the one quality it lacked. What the ruling records is not a marketing error but a theory of the public: that we are a mass unable to hold two consecutive sentences in mind at once. The theory is not entirely wrong, which is why the trick is attempted. It is not entirely right either, which is why the ruling exists.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
The WireServing Police Officer Uses Law-Enforcement Resources to Help Disguise Stolen Cars, in a Scheme Undone by a Colleague Walking Through a Car Park
The professional's advantage over the amateur is supposed to be knowledge of how detection actually works. Here the knowledge was drawn straight from the well — police databases, police resources, police habits of mind — and what it produced was a stolen car parked unattended, with a filed-down number, in a garage that police officers walk through as a matter of routine. Access to the machine had been mistaken for immunity from it, which is the oldest error available to anyone issued a credential. The colleague who ended it was not conducting a year-long investigation. He was doing extra checks.
Source: Arlington County Police Department
The WireSolicitor Takes £23,510 of a Client's Money Into His Own Personal Account, Pays Counsel Out of It, and Then Explains That He Supplied the Wrong Account Details by Mistake
The £10 is the detail that repays study. Nobody tests a mistake; a mistake simply happens, at full size, once. A tenner first, then a thousand, then two, then twenty-two and a half — that is not an error in a sort code, that is a man taking the temperature of the water. And the account from which he paid counsel is, necessarily, an account he knew perfectly well he had. What the phrase 'given in error' defends is not the money, which is gone, but the self-image: that he remains the sort of man who makes clerical slips rather than the sort who takes his client's money. The tribunal declined the offer. Ordinary and decent people, it observed, would consider the conduct dishonest — a sentence written for the benefit of a man who had evidently stopped consulting them.
Source: The Law Society Gazette / Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal
The WireHairstyling Company Borrows Influencer Videos, Implies Endorsements From Fashion Brands It Has No Relationship With, and Cannot Show That Its Testimonials Came From Anybody At All
Three separate borrowings, and not one of them a claim about the product itself: other people's fame, other people's videos, other people's enthusiasm. The company was not lying about what the thing does — it appears never to have reached that subject. It was assembling, from stock parts, the impression of a firm other people already admire, on the theory that admiration is the commodity and the merchandise merely its packaging. La Rochefoucauld, above, has already filed this one.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
Black-Robed EgomaniaJudge Is Fined Precisely the Sum She Improperly Donated, Having Already Been Cautioned Once for Campaign Conduct, and the Supreme Court Adds a Suspension the Commission Had Not Asked For
Consider what it takes to telephone a lawyer with business before your court to ask him to work on your re-election, and then to raise the unreturned call with him directly. The impropriety is not subtle, not technical, and not new to her — she had been warned about precisely this seven years earlier. That is the tell. A first offence can be ignorance of the canons; a second, after a caution, is a settled conviction that the canons describe other judges. The court's remedy has a certain wit to it: the fine is not a round punitive figure but the exact sum she gave away, so the money is simply returned to nobody and she is left holding the transaction with the profit removed. What she keeps, for now, is the office. What the order removes is her assumption that she keeps it unconditionally.
Source: Florida Record / Legal Newsline
The FaithfulHusband Disposes of the Evidence Down the Household Drain, Which Is a Closed System Terminating About Four Feet From His Wife
The drain was chosen, one assumes, because it goes away. Everything in a house goes away: the bin, the post, the browser history. What distinguishes the drain is that it does not go away, it goes down, and it terminates in a pipe belonging to the marriage which is periodically inspected by a stranger with a camera and no stake in the outcome. He was not caught by a private detective, an anonymous letter, or a suspicious wife. He was caught by plumbing — that is, by a system he lived on top of for years without once wondering where it went. The affair required imagination. The concealment was not allocated any.
Source: Upworthy