Introduction
Just a quick post today. I was catching up on my recent news feed and almost spit my coffee out when I saw this story from a few days ago.
According to the BBC a 5 year old girl had set up a little lemonade stall in Mile End (London) where she was selling people glasses of lemonade for 50p.
It seems that a humourless employee from the local council spotted that she was breaking the rules and "heroically" stormed in to shut her criminal enterprise down.
He started filming the girl whilst reading out the various council regulations that she was breaking (presumably he thought that a 5 year old would understand such things).
In the end he fined her £150 because she did not have the requisite license (which she couldn't have anyway because you need to be 17 to have it).
Unsurprisingly the little girl burst into tears and told her father- "I've done a bad thing".
I very much doubt she will ever make "the mistake" of using her initiative again. The streets are safe again (in case it isn't obvious I'm being sarcastic).
You can read the full story here.
My Thoughts - An All Too Common Failure of Common Sense
From what I understand these kind of laws and rules are supposed to exist to protect the public and prevent child labour.
They are not there to harass young children who show entrepreneurial spirit and initiative.
One must ask the question of what was going on in the mind of the council employee who thought this was a valid case for issuing a fine?
Anyone with even a modicum of human decency would have ignored the situation as not being worth their time. Further if they were scared of getting into trouble or not doing their job they could have had a quiet word with the father in private.
It is not difficult to handle a situation with sensitivity and discretion.
Instead they found the situation warranted scaring a small child and possibly traumatising her for life.
I wonder how much entrepreneurial spirit has been crushed as a result of such of such boneheaded actions?
Sadly we find that in many aspects of life, socially awkward, humourless people are given clipboards and rule sets to follow without first checking if they actually have any common sense.
Often these people are incapable of doing anything beyond ticking boxes - exercising actual judgement is actually something which requires too much effort.
Some people even seem to get intoxicated with the power it gives them over others.
In a good system such people would be weeded before they could ever reach such positions and certainly removed if they ever acted in this way.
Sadly it seems that often the exact opposite seems to happen where these kind of people actually seem to be over-represented in these kind of occupations and don't suffer any consequences for their actions.
In this case the council involved has apologised and cancelled the fine but the damage to the young girl is done.
Further there is no word on what action (if any) has been taken against the moronic employee who was responsible for this idiocy.
-One would hope they were fired, but I doubt that happened.
Thank you for reading
