I can recommend the excellent BBC series “The Gold”, which tells the story of the Brinks Mat gold bullion robbery in the 1980s. It’s not the robbery which is the story, rather the laundering of the proceeds, most of which have never been recovered. Most extraordinary was the ease with which £ms were paid into, and withdrawn as cash from a small branch of Barclays in a suburb of Bristol. ‘I reported it to head office’, said the manager in the follow-up documentary, ‘but they told me the commission was too good and to turn a blind eye”. Things have changed over here now, and you’d probably need to at least produce some ID to get away with it. But there’s always someone, somewhere, willing to look in another direction in the right circumstances. And even in our big internet world, cash, it seems, can still be sultan.
“The working-from-home illusion fades”
Are workers working from home more or less productive than those catching the 7.02am to London Bridge every day? ‘Probably sitting at home in their bleedin’ jim-jams’, said someone recently of a less-than-helpful call centre employee, the assumption being that, were they surrounded by colleagues and with a manager cracking the whip, he or she would have sorted his energy bill more efficiently.
