The 1970s are over, Jeffrey

Call Tony Zarb – the Science Council’s employees were kept in these wet-weather tents in the executive chairman’s scandal-ridden Mistra field in the high sun. Team-building or endurance?

You just have to love Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s rapidly developing ‘ageing lesbian’ look.

This story in The Malta Independent is at once sad and hilarious.

How horrid it must be to work for the Malta Council for Science and Technology right now. The executive chairman and his girlfriend, an employee he put on the payroll himself, treat the council like their personal fiefdom.

The serfs are told to report for work at the executive chairman’s field in Mistra Bay. They were not told why – was he going to make them clear the weeds, perhaps? – but when they turned up they were told it is a ‘team-building exercise’.

Of course, they will all have known where the field is because it was the subject of a major scandal on the eve of the 2008 general election and its aftermath.

The Labour Party – chief among them Joseph Muscat at the time – had gone wild about that Mistra field. Now the Labour government is happy to see Pullicino Orlando drag all the Science Council staff there to play at team-building.

But really, the poor staff. Look at those terrible tents, which are meant for wet weather and not to keep the sun off. It must have been a heatstroke-inducing sauna in there. And what on earth were they doing inside them anyway?

And to make matters even worse, the executive chairman will have been talking at them nineteen to the dozen in his usual neurotic monotone while showing no interest in letting anyone else speak, and Miss Lara will have been playing hostess.

Purely as an aside, I see that Pullicino Orlando is one of those unfortunate men who, as they age, end up looking more and more like elderly lesbians or sports mistresses rather than old men, especially in their summer ‘casual’ outfits.

And isn’t it perfectly in character that he would hold this ‘bonding’ session on the only day he usually goes into the Science Council office? What a freeloader.

I love the reporter’s reference to the Rihanna soundtrack.