September 18, 2026 — Galway Paid €28,000 for a New Logo. Told It Was Almost Identical to…

Folly of the Day

Galway Paid €28,000 for a New Logo. Told It Was Almost Identical to a Belgian Shelving Company's, the Council Paused — Then Unveiled It Anyway.

A consultation is a device for discovering what the public thinks, and this one worked perfectly: the public thought the logo belonged to a Belgian shelving firm, the council heard them clearly, and proceeded — which tells you that the consultation was never an instrument of decision but of delay, a period of respectful silence to be observed before doing the thing anyway.

Source: RTÉ News

The Wire

He Let the Chatbot Argue His Unfair-Dismissal Case. The Commission Explained the Law to Him Twice in Plain English. The Chatbot Kept Answering the Other Question, and He Was Billed $1,230 for It.

The machine did not lie to him; it simply answered, with total composure, a question nobody had asked, and he could not tell the difference — which is the whole danger in miniature, since confidence has always been the cheapest thing to manufacture and is now free.

Source: ABC News (Australia)

The Wire

The Man Whose Job Is Adjudicating Other People's Employment Complaints Has Lodged an Employment Complaint, With the Body That Employs Him, About Not Getting an Interview.

Every institution is confident it would survive its own procedures, and almost none of them volunteer to find out; the rare man who does discovers that the machinery he operates daily looks entirely different from the chair on the other side of the table, which is the only education in the subject that has ever worked.

Source: The Irish Times

The Wire

Two Men Were Sent to Fix a Leaking Steam Gasket From On Top of the Boiler, Because the Gantry Did Not Reach. Nobody Had Written Down How to Do It, and Nobody Had Turned the Steam Off.

A company large enough to own three household brands is large enough to own a lock-off procedure, and the gap between those two facts is where the money goes: £594,000 for a document nobody could be bothered to write, which is a high price per page even by consultancy standards.

Source: HSE Media Centre

The Wire

He Swore to the High Court That He Had Never Brought This Case Before. He Had Brought It Several Times Before. That Cost Him Two Lakh.

He came to the court dressed as the public interest, having concluded that the one institution in India with a complete record of what he had previously filed would not think to look at it — a plan whose only weak point was every part of it.

Source: LiveLaw

The Wire

The Supplement Was Advertised as Real Food With No Ultra-Processed Ingredients. The Regulator Read the Ingredients. The Company Called the Ruling a Victory for Pedantry Over Public Health.

A company that built its business on telling the public to read the label was undone by a regulator who read the label, and the response — that the definition is absurd — would carry more weight had the company not chosen the definition, printed it on the packet, and sold it.

Source: Marketing Week

The Wire

He Was the Sole Director, the Transport Manager and the Driver. When the Tachograph Recorded a Man Who No Longer Worked There, He Denied It Under Caution — Then Admitted He Had Been Driving on the Other Man's Card.

Being your own compliance officer is a considerable saving right up to the morning you have to investigate yourself, at which point the post turns out to have been unfilled the whole time.

Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner

Black-Robed Egomania

She Made More Than Nine Hundred Political Donations. The Code Forbids Judges From Making Any. She Said She Thought the Rule Only Covered State Races and Had Not Noticed Some Were Recurring.

Nine hundred is not an oversight, it is a habit, and the defence — that she had not read the rule carefully and had not noticed the standing order — is the precise defence she would have been paid to disbelieve had anyone offered it to her from the well of her own courtroom.

Source: Central Florida Public Media

The Villages

Forty Miles. Seventeen Minutes in the Air. Roughly Three Thousand Dollars. The Drive Would Have Taken Three-Quarters of an Hour.

The interesting figure is not the three thousand dollars but the twenty-five minutes, because a person who will spend that much to avoid that little has arrived at the belief that their time is the scarcest substance in the world — a conviction that survives no contact whatsoever with the rest of us.

Source: Yahoo Entertainment

Campus Watch

The University Requires a Press Officer to Sit In on Interviews With Its Own Professors. The Student Editor Wrote That This Was a Problem. The University Sent the Police to Discuss It With Him.

An institution that insists on a chaperone for every conversation with its own faculty has already told you what it believes its faculty would say unsupervised; sending the police to a nineteen-year-old about it merely published the confession.

Source: The College Fix