Folly of the DayThe Council Cemented a Fence Across an Eighty-One-Year-Old's Garden Gap, Then Spent Three Years in Court Insisting It Was Entitled To. The Judge's Word for Its Conduct Was 'Pugnacious'.
An institution cannot apologise, because an apology is an admission and an admission is a precedent; so it litigates, and the fence becomes a principle, and the principle becomes three years and somebody else's fifty thousand pounds. Note what the council will not disclose: not the fence, not the law, but the bill. It knows exactly which of the three is indefensible.
Source: Derby Telegraph
The WireThe Council Paid $435,000 to Be Told It Had 330 Too Many Staff. Large Parts of the Report Were Written by a Machine, From Three-Year-Old Figures Taken Off a Lobby Group's Website, and It Was Out by $21.5 Million.
Four hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars buys a great deal of arithmetic, and the council bought none of it; what it bought was the sentence it had already decided to hear. Having established that the number was imaginary, it declines to ask for the money back — because asking would concede that it had commissioned a conclusion rather than a count.
Source: RNZ
The Wire'Do You Know Who the F— I Am?' He Demanded, Sacking the Man. The Fair Work Commission Never Found Out, Because He Did Not Turn Up to the Hearing.
The question was rhetorical and the Commission answered it anyway: he was the man who was not there. Self-importance on this scale is a full-time occupation and leaves nothing in the diary for the one appointment at which it might have been defended.
Source: HRD Australia
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He Owed the Firm £16,000, So He Called the Solicitor a Fraudster on Google. Under Cross-Examination He Accepted That None of It Was True. The Review Attracted Two Likes and Cost Him £9,500.
Two likes — that is the entire readership he assembled, at four thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds apiece. The man who will not settle a bill can always find the money for a gesture, which is the whole difference between a debt and a grievance.
Source: Law Society Gazette
The WireThe University Told the Law Lecturer in Writing That It Would Not Describe the Payment as an Early Retirement Scheme. He Signed Anyway, Then Sued on the Ground That He Had Been Led to Believe It Was One.
Three professions and a trade union were retained to read a document that had already said no in plain English, and the one man present who taught law for a living construed the refusal as an agreement. Expertise is no defence against wishful reading; it merely equips the reader to draft the appeal.
Source: HRD Australia
The WireFifty-Nine Callouts in a Single Month. The Rescue Team Says People Are Arriving at an Exposed Grade One Scramble Having Seen a Photograph of It Taken in Good Weather.
A photograph is a mountain with the weather, the exposure, the fitness and the consequences cropped out, which is to say it is not a mountain at all. The volunteer walking up in the dark to collect you is the part of the picture that was never in the frame.
Source: North Wales Live
The WireHe Put Three Hundred Pages of Machine-Written Argument Before the Employment Appeal Tribunal. It Breached the Practice Direction, and in the End Nobody Relied on a Word of It.
A skeleton argument is so called because it is meant to be bones. Three hundred pages is a carcass. The machine will supply precisely as much confidence as it is asked for, and a man who cannot distinguish volume from force will ask for all of it.
Source: Personnel Today
The WireThe Chamber of Commerce, the Governorship and the Municipality Combined to Cook 1,807 Gallons of Beans, and Described the Resulting Certificate as a Historic Achievement for the Region.
Three arms of government, an engineer and a food-safety professional were mobilised so that a company in London could certify that nobody had previously troubled to cook this many beans at once. History is long; the human appetite for being assured that it is watching is longer.
Source: UPI
Black-Robed EgomaniaHe Heard an Appeal Lying Prone in Bed on Painkillers, Told the Parties He Could Not Navigate the Bundles and Had Grown Tired, and Then Took Sixteen Months to Hand Down the Judgment.
The robe is not a dressing gown, and the whole of the institution lives in that distinction. A man who believes the authority resides in himself rather than in the chair will hear an appeal from anywhere — and will then take sixteen months to discover what it was he heard.
Source: Legal Futures
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