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 ...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog