bizRichard

But, your honour, I was just . . .

Bureaucracy - don’t you just hate it? And I don’t mean bureaucracy per se. What really irks me is how these small minded, government funded, ‘jobsworth’ characters interpret the law. Because they don’t think the same way the ‘legislators’ think.

Faith in the British judicial system often has had a rough ride and, like me, you possibly find it heartening to see a brutal crackdown on crime and disorder every now and again, as indeed the following two scenarios witness.

Firstly, the unnamed 12-year-old, recently in the dock for throwing a cocktail sausage at an elderly neighbour. This vicious assault occurred on August 11th, in Manchester. The sausage landed on the neighbour’s shoulder, and reports suggest, thankfully, that no serious injuries were sustained. I suspect the penalty will result in a firm scolding, and possibly the loss of several weeks’ pocket money.

Then came the case of an immoral teenager, arrested for “stealing” someone’s internet connection. The police, you may recount, caught the degenerate hiding in a back garden in Ivybridge, brazenly piggybacking the victim’s Wi-Fi connection. Well, they’ve only gone and let him off - with no more than a caution. Can you believe it? They didn’t even interrogate him for 36 hours, or trap his fingers in a drawer so that he could never again log-on to Google. “Hopefully, he has learnt his lesson” said a lenient sounding PC Butterworth.

Is this what passes for ‘law and order’ in this country nowadays? I haven’t read about such a daft waste of police time since the student who was thrown into the cells for calling a police horse “gay”.

Facetious I maybe, and cynical I surely am.

But what has this got to do with business?

One moment the government is encouraging you, me, all of us, to pool our resources, such as sharing car journeys or bathwater, etc, to save millions of money and spare the planet’s rapidly deteriorating environment. And I applaud them for their efforts in promoting these issues - apart from which sharing a bath has got to be fun!

But then, the next moment, they want to arrest us when we extend these ‘sharing and saving’ principles to Wi-Fi.

Is the problem business?

You and me, the public, all know that we could share resources to ease our carbon footprint.

But then do businesses really want us making all these friendly arrangements? Probably not. Because, if we do, it will only lead on to a dilution of profit – and we can’t have that!

So who should the government be working for? Business, or the public?

The answer is both.

If you and I shared our costs, then we both would have more to spend on other things that business produces. And the same goes for most other people too. This could therefore be a win-win solution all round. Everyone gains.

Your business wins, and my business wins also - because everyone, having saved by sharing, now has more to spend elsewhere!

But what hope is there if internet “hitching” becomes a serious crime?

What hope for the other aspects of life and business, like when you peer through a pub window to check on the half-time score, or sniff the air to take in the aroma of freshly ground coffee as you pass by the restaurant? Will that become ‘theft’ too?

Perhaps I can leave you to ponder on what tomorrow’s laws (or rather the interpretation thereof) might bring to you and your business! But don’t lose too much sleep over the issue - not yet anyway.

Now, go make some money the smart way.

biz Richard C.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Fun - Food for Thought, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.