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.)

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