Folly of the DayA Spreadsheet Converted Canadian Dollars Into American Dollars. They Were Already Canadian. British Columbia's Budget Was Out by $1.5 Billion.
The largest forecasting error in the province's recent history was discovered by people outside the government, in a letter, because a ministry that produces numbers for a living had built no habit of reading its own — and note the shape of the defence: "human error" is the phrase an institution reaches for precisely when the failure was institutional, since no single human being is ever permitted to be wrong by one and a half billion dollars on his own.
Source: Black Press Media (Today in B.C.)
The WireThe Cantonment Board Took His Taxes for Eight Years. Then It Told the Court He Had No Right to Be There.
A receipt is an argument, filed in the issuing body's own handwriting, against everything it later wishes to say — and the board's real error was not greed but amnesia, the standing institutional conviction that the file begins on the morning somebody decides to open it.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireThe Council Refused the Caravan Park Permission, Then Refused to Reconsider. It Is Now Paying for Both.
It is never the refusal that costs the ratepayer; it is the interval afterwards, in which a body with no personal stake in the outcome discovers that it would very much rather be consistent than right.
Source: GB News
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The Conveyor Had No Guard. The Engineer Sent to Maintain It Will Not Get the Use of His Arm Back. The Fine Was £160,000.
A guard is the cheapest object in any factory and always the first to be reasoned away, because it defends against something that has not happened yet — which is how a firm persuades itself it is economising on steel when what it is actually economising on is the arm of the one man obliged to reach inside.
Source: HSE Media Centre
The WireCornwall Council Went to the High Court to Keep £2.1 Million. It Lost on All Eight Grounds, Including the One About Hiring Cornish People.
The council did not make an error of law so much as an error of reading — it accepted European money on European terms and then wrote into the contract the one condition those terms exist to forbid — and it has since spent a further undisclosed sum asking a judge to agree that the words meant something other than what they said.
Source: Local Government Lawyer
The WireHe Was Called to the Bar Without Mentioning That the Solicitors' Regulator Had Already Put Conditions on Him. Both Professions Have Now Finished With Him.
A man who treats a regulator's finding as a private matter between himself and the regulator has misunderstood the entire purpose of a profession, which exists so that strangers may safely rely on a stranger — and he has now proved the point twice, in two different robes.
Source: Solicitor News
The WireHe Came to Court on Behalf of the Public. He Declined to Mention His Previous Visits. The Bench Priced the Omission at ₹2 Lakh.
Public interest is the last respectable disguise available to a private grievance, and the tell never varies: the litigant who has come to inform the court about the condition of the world declines, at the crucial moment, to inform it about himself.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireThe Department Paid a Film Grant of $5 Million Against an Eligibility of $2.8 Million, Paid One Recipient the Same $30,000 Twice, and Three Years Later Still Has Not Got It Back.
A department that pays out on the recipient's own account of what he spent has not been defrauded so much as it has volunteered, and the duplicate cheque is the detail that gives the game away — it takes a particular kind of institutional serenity to send a man thirty thousand dollars twice and then spend three years not asking for it back.
Source: Canadian Taxpayers Federation (reporting the Auditor General of New Brunswick)
Black-Robed EgomaniaHe Took Seven Months to Decide One Case. He Found the Time to Send Sexually Explicit Messages to His Own Court Clerk.
The two findings are not separate complaints but one, because the same man decided what the hours of a court are for: seven months of litigants waiting on a decision he could not get to, and a clerk who could not get away from the correspondence he could — a robe worn as a licence rather than a duty, by a man who had evidently stopped being able to tell which of the two it was.
Source: Washington State Commission on Judicial Conduct
Campus WatchTrinity University Spent More Than a Year Redesigning Its Logo, Outsourced Part of the Work, and Has Now Paused the Rollout.
A university is an institution whose entire claim is that it can teach people to think, which makes the rebrand the one purchase it can never justify: it is the admission, in four colours and a serif, that the place would rather be recognised than understood.
Source: The Trinitonian (Trinity University student newspaper)
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