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COMMONSENSE NOT ALLOWED
As featured in The Independent, July 2009
Sir: Deborah Orr’s account of her day on South West Trains (June 27) rang a number of bells. I have had the same kind of experience dealing with railway officials, banks, shops and call centres. It seems in many organisations the “nyet” factor, (anyone visiting the USSR before 1989 will remember the frustrations), is positively fostered thus enabling small people hiding behind the rules to feel a misguided sense of importance. However the real culprits are the managers who set up the kind of directives that make no allowance for common sense. It is in fact an insult to their employees tantamount to saying they are incapable of exercising judgement, and the opposite of empowering.
In the case of the railways, the real transgressors who want to avoid paying fares will still do so, it is the law abiding majority whose lives are made more difficult by this type of petty officialdom.
Unfortunately such small mindedness is spreading: where I live on the Ashdown Forest there is a by-law forbidding use of mountain bikes. This morning I came across an elderly lady who, teaching her grandchildren to ride their bikes on a little-used track, had been harangued by a passer- by because “it was against the rules”. Recently I was chided by a member of the public who mistakenly thought I had taken a non-plastic glass into the cinema. These vignettes say it all about the type of society we are sliding into where people somehow think such interventions principled or heroic.
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