December 1984 – No.2
1 December 1984Dec 1984 – Thank you for your kind comments about the first issue of ‘QC.’
Activity in the property year always seems to be squeezed into these last three months. A year starts with a lull as the effect of Christmas and New Year celebrations rub off and the cold weather sets it. Spring arrives, and it’s the start of the holiday season, together with racing and Ascot, tennis at Wimbledon and the generally relaxed feeling that with summer’s warmth, the annual slow-down is in swing. The final run up to Christmas, which used to start in September but has now -been put back·to October, is a course for the fit as everything has to be done at a cracking pace and decisions are no longer avoided.
It’s one of the strange quirks peculiar to the humans that, in the need to plan ahead with such certainty (as if certainty could be guaranteed), we still tend to leave things to the last minute. Experts in motivation say that if we all worked every day as if we were off on holiday the next, we’d get through an incredible volume of work. On the other hand, we’d also probably run out of work to do every day. The Christmas ‘week’ so disturbs the flow of adrenalin that those who thrive under pressure crack up under the strain of not being able to work!
A Client has kindly supplied the following piece of bureaucratic thinking, which was given to him by a pensioner who asked him to explain it to her. Courtesy of the DHSS, winners of the 1984 Golden Bull Award:
“With reference to your letter about rates. In 1981 you were paid the supplementary rates. This meant that, as this was withdrawn, but not on most of the supplementary benefit cases, that on the rates for 1982/1983 year were reduced by the amount actually paid by us from the previous year. This has meant that the amount paid for your rates last year was not quite the total amount charged as this had been paid before. I hope this clarifies the situation.”
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