LOOKING A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH

She loved her horses and had grown up with them right from the first “My Little Pony” to the hunter she now clung to as often as she could, a birthday present from her Daddy. Running the company as she tried to, the one her Daddy had started almost twenty years ago, meant that she didn't have all the time to herself and her horse that she would have liked. None the less there were the odd days or half days when she could scive off on the pretext of seeing somebody about something to do with work. No one really asked what the MD was doing. No body questioned her ability or at least not to her face. There were some, senior management and co-directors but not share holders, who muttered behind their hands about the MD's commitment to the job.

“Where's Miranda today?” The question would be asked even though the answer was a foregone conclusion. Miranda was most likely out with her horse.

The company had been successful. Certainly in her Daddy's day the firm had prospered. Making profits was getting harder and harder and Miranda didn't have the business acumen that her Daddy had once shown. She didn't have the drive or the hunger that her Daddy had used to grow the turnover every year. Basically Miranda wanted the perks of her position without the pain of office. She had grown up spoilt and as one ex-employee once said, “The first generation makes it. The second spends it.”

Ex-employees under Miranda's watch were getting to be more plentiful than current employees. Her record at HR (human resources) and hiring and keeping “good people” was abysmal but like the days off no one said much. Like an over indulged child with a new toy, she soon got fed up and wanted to move on to something new, something different. Being MD and a major share holder gave her the power, that dreadful inherited strength, to play with other people's lives as she saw fit to do. If your face didn't fit then you were in and out of the job before you could say, “Where's my desk ?”

Miranda didn't like doing the dirty work herself and always got her long suffering FD (financial director) to clean up after her. He was a well meaning accountant that her Daddy had taken on years previously and who'd become the typical “Yes” man that didn't always suit the business as much as it suited Miranda. It was the FD who had on countless occasions asked hapless candidates to meet him upstairs in the Board room to face the process of redundancy or similar. The Board room actually became known as the Departure Lounge amongst that part of the chattering work force.

Unfair dismissal usually followed unfair dismissal and always Miranda's Daddy would dig deep to settle Miranda's whim, paper over the cracks in her poor decision making. Most victims would disappear without a fight some happy to be let free from a job they didn't much enjoy and some (the more senior) with a little tax free pay in their pocket and a few weeks gardening leave because Miranda didn't want them reappearing in the competition's camp straight away.
One day in January, just when every one had started back after the Christmas break, Miranda asked her FD to get rid of Billy. Billy she had decided was no good at his job in the warehouse and his position could easily be made redundant saving a few grand a year and helping to cut the overheads in an effort to shore up the business against increasing losses.

“Billy is surplus to current requirement,” she told the FD, “so please get rid of him.”

Now even though Billy appeared a bit simple and was the sort who'd never look at you when being spoken to, he didn't take what the FD told him about the job being made redundant as obvious.

“Who's going to drive the fork lift?” he asked the FD who in truth couldn't answer.

What Miranda had failed to tell her FD was that she had promised a friend of hers, someone's son from the riding stables she used, that he could have a job in the warehouse for less than Billy had been paid. What she didn't know was that Billy and the new boy drank in the same pub and that only the night before Billy was invited by the FD to the Departure Lounge, he and the new employee had been toasting their new working relationship together.

“That's a bit of a cock up.” said the FD when the truth came out. “You can't make a role redundant and then take someone on for the same job.”

“I know that. I'm not thick. ” Miranda knew that she had made another mistake. She also worked on the premise that the best form of defence is attack.

“Billy won't do anything about it, “ she said to her FD dismissively.

She was wrong. A letter came in from Billy's solicitor, the one he went to see and the one who was happy to take on his case.

“We'll sack him then,” said Miranda annoyed that this hick-up was anywhere near her desk. “Let's do him for gross misconduct or anything. There must be something on him we can get him for.”

The FD's task was to find something on Billy and the witch-hunt began. There was a verbal warning on his personnel file when he'd parked his red van in one of the Director's car parking spaces that time he was late and couldn't find another space anywhere. He'd meant to move it but had forgotten and by mid-morning the question had been asked, “Why is that tatty red van parked in the Director's car parking space?”

He had too been told not to drive the fork lift so fast and without a hard hat on. There wasn't a paper trail on this but the warehouse manager (he hadn't been in the job that long) remembered that Billy had been told.

“Put everything in writing,” said the frustrated FD who put everything in writing.

What got him in the end was the misuse of company e-mails. Billy had sent an e-mail from the company e-mail address to a mail order company asking for some sexual enhancing pills to be sent to him at his place of work so that his mother, who he lived at home with, didn't get to see the packet that the postman eventually delivered. She would have opened it as she did with most of Billy's post. It was, so the FD told him, a serious breach of his service agreement to use the company e-mail system for unauthorised personal use and as such Billy was going to be suspended.

Sadly Billy's case never went to the tribunal that considers such things. Billy couldn't afford the fees that his solicitor needed to fight his corner.

“You might have a good case for unfair dismissal,” said the lawyer, “but I'm afraid that it's a case I cannot take on if you're not insured.” Sadly for Billy he wasn't.

Miranda brushed aside the affair and Billy's departure made way for her friend's son, the one she'd promised the job to. She met her at the riding stables and her friend thanked her for giving her son the job.

“I'm not the managing director for nothing,” said Miranda as she set off on her high horse , set off for her usual decent Monday afternoon's hack in the country-side.

Miranda didn't see the thin wire stretched tightly between the two gate posts at about hock height. Her horse who'd been encouraged into a decent canter didn't either and as the wire sliced neatly into its flesh the animal crashed to the ground with an ungainly lurch that put its rider clean over its head so that when the two had finished sliding along the firm ground both had broken their necks. They lay together, face to stunned face, head to bleeding head, in grotesque close proximity.

No one saw the tatty red van as it pulled away from the lay-by not far from where Miranda was looking a gift horse in the mouth.