“But why should I follow the rules?” Bob Papworth reports on ways in which buyers are dealing with – and doing deals with – the maverick business traveller
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BACK IN THE 1960s, life at Bancroft’s School was dominated by rules. Boys had to ask permission to take a bath more than twice a week. Dormitory lights went out at 9pm. Walking on the quadrangle lawns was strictly verboten, and running in corridors wasn’t quite a capital offence, but not far off. School caps were not worn on school premises, but were compulsory off-site. All pubs were strictly out of bounds. The penalties for contravention were, by today’s namby-pamby Guardian-reading liberal standards, harsh. Corporal punishment was the norm – two strokes of the
cane for talking after lights-out and other minor infringements, four for repeat offences, and six for smoking.
So guess what we did? We infested the local pubs, cap-free, wasting our termly allowances on halves of Double Diamond we didn’t really want. We sneaked out of dormitories at unearthly hours just to walk on the quadrangle lawns. The really daring actually smoked while doing so. Of course, those in authority knew precisely what we were doing. For the most part, they turned a blind eye, grateful that – as far as they knew – we weren’t dropping
acid or getting off with the girls from Woodford County High. They knew, as did we, that the rules were there to be broken.
YOU WILL OBEY...PLEASE The word ‘mandation’ – if it is a word, which is in itself questionable, popularised as it was by Sarah Palin – not only didn’t exist then, it didn’t work either.
And the corporate travel industry
appears, at long last, to have woken up to that fact. Tell people what to do, and there will always be a maverick contingent who will deliberately disobey; ask people to do something – and explain the reasons for the