Folly of the DayHe Invented a Police Constable to Get Nando's CCTV of His Ex. He Paid for the Fake Officer's Email With His Own Debit Card.
A man whose entire livelihood is the forensic dismantling of police procedure sat down and impersonated the police, and did it with the tradecraft of a child forging a sick note. Observe what the nickname was doing all along: 'The Legal Missile' is not a description, it is a wish, and a man who has to award himself a nickname has already conceded that nobody else was going to. The interesting question is not why he thought Nando's would believe him — Nando's did believe him, briefly, which is the only part of the plan that worked. It is why a professional sceptic, paid to assume that every official document is a lie until tested, could not extend that assumption to a document he had just written himself. Self-regard is a solvent. It dissolves the very faculty a man is proudest of, and it works quietly, so that the last person to notice is the one holding the debit card.
Source: Legal Futures
The WireThe Town Spent $86,000 Filming Its Own Staff Retreat. Then $35,000 on a Documentary About the Making of the Film.
The sunglasses are a joke; the documentary about the documentary is a philosophy. Somewhere in that building a person proposed that the film of the meeting was itself an event sufficiently historic to warrant a second film, and — this is the part worth sitting with — nobody in the room laughed. An institution reaches a particular altitude of self-regard when it stops producing services and begins producing evidence of its own significance, at which point the archive becomes the product and the taxpayer becomes the audience. Note that the ghostwritten book about the town manager cost more than most of the town's residents earn in a year. They were not stealing, exactly. They were commissioning a portrait, and the sitter was themselves.
Source: Carolina Journal / North Carolina Office of the State Auditor
The WireSeventy-Six of the Council's Eighty-Nine Members Were Paid Too Much. Not One of Them Mentioned It.
Thirteen were underpaid and, one assumes, noticed rather promptly. The other seventy-six opened a bank statement showing a sum larger than expected and experienced no curiosity whatsoever — which is not fraud, and is not even dishonesty in any prosecutable sense; it is something more ordinary and more damning, the ancient conviction that a windfall in one's own favour is simply the universe finally getting the arithmetic right. The report is careful to say the fault rests entirely with officers, and so it does. But scrutiny is the entire advertised function of the office these people hold, and it turns out to be a faculty they can operate in every direction but one.
Source: The Oldham Times
The WireFined £3,500 Over Paperwork, the Solicitor Compared Himself to Andrew Malkinson and the Subpostmasters.
A man wrongly imprisoned for eighteen years, hundreds of subpostmasters bankrupted and jailed on the word of a computer, and a solicitor in Norwich asked to fill in a risk assessment. He put all three in the same sentence and heard nothing wrong with it. This is the specific vanity of the long career: four decades of being the cleverest man in a small room persuade a person that any instruction he did not personally originate must be an injustice, and the vocabulary of martyrdom lies about the place, freshly minted by real victims, ready to be borrowed by anyone shameless enough to reach for it. The tribunal's answer was the correct one and is worth memorising. You may choose how to do the thing. You may not choose to have not done it.
Source: Legal Futures / Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal
The WireThe Transport Manager Recorded His Working Time Only on Days He Had Driven. The Rest of the Job, Apparently, Was Not Work.
There is a theory of the self buried in that record-keeping habit, and it is worth exhuming: the hours in which he drove were real, and the hours in which he merely ran the company were not. A man documents the part of his week he privately considers to be the work, and this ledger is a confession that its author did not regard the compliance — the notifying, the downloading, the acting on infringements he had already troubled to record — as work at all. He had the data. He generated it himself. He simply declined to treat his own paperwork as though it were addressed to anybody.
Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner
Black-Robed EgomaniaHe Secretly Recorded His Fellow Judges. Then He Deleted the Recordings in Front of the Police Officers Who Had Come About the Recordings.
Destroying evidence is a recognised offence with a settled body of law behind it, and he did it standing in front of the police, which suggests he had stopped experiencing law enforcement as a category of person who does things and started experiencing them as scenery. That is the occupational disease of the bench in its terminal form. Years of being the only one in the room whose word converts directly into consequence eventually erode the memory that the machinery runs in both directions and is not, in fact, an extension of oneself. He sat on the Orphans' Court — an institution that exists to supervise what people leave behind — and could not manage the elementary act of leaving a recording alone.
Source: The Daily Record / Supreme Court of Maryland
LazyTownHe Could Not Be Bothered to Report That His Own Driving Licence Had Been Endorsed. He Confirmed He Knew He Had To.
He knew the rule. He said so out loud, on the record, to the examiner. He simply preferred the version of the week in which the rule had not yet been reached. That is the whole architecture of sloth: not ignorance, which is at least a condition one suffers, but the deliberate deferral of a two-minute act until the two minutes have been replaced by a public inquiry, a curtailed licence, and a permanent entry against your name in a government database that anyone may read forever. The email would have taken less time than this paragraph.
Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner