I was driving home today listening to the news on the radio.

"And it has just been announced that Lloyds / TSB will be shutting their dealer finance division in Speke, Liverpool with the loss of 200 jobs."

Just another in a long litany of closures and job losses since the financial illusionists plunged us into this infernal pea souper.

But, you know, it's just a number, they might as well be talking about carrots or unicycling poodles. It doesn't mean anything. Especially when taken into context with all of the other MILLIONS of job losses that there have been over the last few months.

However, this time it did mean something.

It meant quite a lot.

One of those 200 is the woman I am married to.

Her name's Jo.

She's fearsome.

She'll batter me half to death for writing this, but as long as it takes her mind off the incompetent bastards who she has worked for, that's fine by me. It's about the only useful service that I can offer.

Let me tell you a bit more about Jo.

She started working for the bank back when it wasn't expected that every Tom, Dick and Harriet would go to university. She went to work, instead.

And has she worked.

In the 15 years that I have known Jo, she's probably had no more than a week off work due to illness [chicken pox]. She's *never* moaned about going into work. She's never failed her duty. In fact, in the majority of cases, she has excelled at what she does.

I'm still not 100% clear on what that is.

It involves writing and presenting training courses to people who sell cars for a living.

Okay, she's not a nurse or a teacher -- but if you've ever bought a car and quizzed the salesman about the different ways you can pay for it, what kind of insurance is available, and all that [I've only ever bought one car, so I"m not super sharp on the details] then my wife, or one of her colleagues, will have written the courses that teaches salesmen how to pass on the information clearly.

20-ish years of punctuality, application and diligence.

20-ish years of reliability and professionalism.

All teetering on the edge of the drain.

Because a tiny minority of greedy and evil untouchables had to leach as much as they could from an unregulated system.

Thousands of lives left in disarray because of this.

And not one head in the block.

Not one.

Instead, a snowstorm of excuses and an even denser storm of our HARD-EARNED TAXES trying to plug the evil hole.

I'll never listen to the job loss figures with antipathy again.

I'll never forgive a political system that has allowed the human beings that support it to be treated so despicably.

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