Three

Half of my team is still off sick and the ones who are not ill don’t seem to be doing much better in other ways. One of them has had rather a bad run of things. First she was involved in a car crash on the way into work. Then she was stopped at some traffic lights and a police officer in the car next to hers indicated that one of her children was not properly strapped in. He had undone his seatbelt a few moments before to pick up a car he had dropped on the floor –and the officer saw this. So my colleague pulled over to the side of the road to do his seat belt up and the officer then pulled over and issued her with a fixed penalty fine for driving while her child’s seatbelt was undone. My colleague asked what she should have done to do up the seatbelt other than pull over e.g. should she have got out of the car in the middle of traffic and done it, but the officer (who was female) wouldn’t answer the question and just continued to write out the fine. I was very unimpressed by this and have suggested that she speak to a solicitor (we can do this for free through work) and find out what would happen if she tried to contact the fine and that she also should put in a complaint to the police.

She then phoned me at home last night and said that her car had been broken into and she had left her handbag in the car so she had lost all her bank cards, money etc etc etc. She was also worried that she’d had her work passes stolen as she didn’t know how to report those as lost, so those were the only things that she hadn’t sorted. I didn’t know either, but will check at work today.

I did say to her that they say these things come in threes (not that I am superstitious, but it seemed the right thing to say) and so hopefully it was going to be better from here on in.