#twitterjoketrial

The #twitterjoketrial reminded me a little of a story Mrs Daycoder told me recently. It's a case of procedures gone mad and common sense thrown out of the window.

Mrs Daycoder is a primary school teacher. She's trained in first aid. The school has an incident book, in which, according to procedures, all accidents and injuries must be recorded. The staff mostly have a reasonable amount of common sense, so below a certain threshold, very minor accidents and injuries simply aren't recorded. Once they make it into the book, then staff have no choice but to follow procedures to the letter.

One of the teaching assistants (TA) doesn't have quite as much common sense. She's a stickler for the rules. A child came in from the playground with a splinter in his finger. The TA immediately wrote it into the incident book, and procedures then had to be followed. The procedures forbid any medical treatment by staff, the child's legal guardian must be called in to deal with the incident, and this is what happened. The school secretary had to explain and apologise to the dumbfounded mother of this child that the staff weren't allowed to remove the splinter from her son's finger, and requested that she come to the school to deal with the incident. After convincing the mum that it wasn't a joke, she reluctantly came in. Had any of the other staff dealt with the issue at the start, they'd have done so without fuss and without the incident being logged.

The #twitterjoketrail is the same thing. At each stage, it came to the attention of someone who wouldn't or couldn't defy procedure for some reason. Perhaps through a legitimate fear of taking responsibility, a lack of common sense or pig-headedness.

That someone should have a criminal record, and have had his chosen career halted because of this should appall all of us.