Are you disrespecting me?

Fire? Just down there on the right...

If someone more senior than you at work does or says something that you feel isn’t respectful towards you, what do you do?

Point it out to them - they shouldn’t be allowed to do that? Brush it off – it happens? Sulk for a bit? Light a fire and cause £8 million of damage?

The latter was exactly what Amazon employee Adris Ali did back in November. He had been working as a picker in their warehouse in Rugely for around three months.

Feeling disrespected by a team leader, he set light to a pile of papers and wandered off. By the time the subsequent blaze had been successfully extinguished, £7.3m of stuff had been damaged. Add in nearly three-quarters of a million to clean up and sort the mess out afterwards, and that’s one expensive episode of feeling a bit slighted.

Ali will have a bit of time to ponder the damage, and risk to life, his actions caused, during the 48 months he’s going to be spending behind bars. I’m sure he’ll get lots of respect in there. If he starts counting now, reaching eight million should be pretty achievable.

Presumably, when he gets out in four years he won’t want to buy from his former employer. Tricky – it’s hard not to head to their website when you want... well, just about anything, really. On the sobering side, Amazon probably made that amount in the time it took me to write this.

In other “Grow up! What’s wrong with you?” news, Nicki Minaj and Cardi B have been involved in a scuffle!

I confess, I haven’t got much of a clue as to who these ladies are, but from my limited research, they appear to be in a competition to see who has the most weirdly drawn-on eyebrows, and one of them has a daughter called Kulture Kiara Cephus. And they’re rappers.

They got into an unseemly scrap at New York Fashion Week, possibly because one of them made comments about the other one’s parenting skills. Absolutely the way to prove you’re a tip-top parent is to set a fine example by getting into a scuffle with your accuser.

Well done, everybody. Stay classy. I am finding it slightly tricky to respect you right now, but on the plus side I don’t have immediate access to a large stack of flammable material or any matches.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 14th of September 2018, where it was re-titled as "We need to talk about respect", which is also the title used in the version on their website. Both used my original title as the opening line again.

I did look up Nicki and Cardi. I was none the wiser afterwards.

(CD A-Z: Got a minute? OK. Well, for about a year and a half I worked in a shop, as warehouse manager, although I spent a fair bit of time in the store itself. They used to stock Putamayo World Music CDs, and play them over the sound system to entice customers to purchase. When the store was taken over by new owners, they stopped stocking them and everyone else was sick to the back teeth of hearing them, so I got to keep them - about 15. So I'm currently listening to "French Cafe". Longest explanation ever. Carry on.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Unstable Stables: Throw away the key

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple...

Is it foggy? No.

When I get put in charge (which is bound to happen soon), I'm going to introduce a whole raft of new laws, for I shall be a just and fair ruler. I'm quite liking the title of 'Most Marvellous Emperor Of Sensible Regulations And Bountiful Lovingness Not To Mention Exceedingly Handsome', but it might be a bit long. On that basis, I'll settle for the more informal 'He Who Is Smashing' from my loyal subjects. Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes - had you noticed? Here, then, is the first law that will introduced: grumpyf1 law No.1 - Turn your fog lights off, you complete git. Don't get me wrong; If it genuinely is foggy, fog lights are quite handy. The reason for introduction of this law is because 96% of the time (based on my own in-depth research) it isn't foggy when some utter cockwomble blinds you. This has always been a bit of a problem but in the last couple of years it seems to have escalated out of control, possibly because of the...

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