Sometimes, I really don’t understand what you are after. Being angry at lies, misfortune and wrong predictions is understandable but, sometimes, it seems to me that you are angry for the sake of being angry. Raging against anything and everything without having some goal in sight is not very helpful.

Are you suggesting that we go back to a subsistence economy?

I really don’t think that many people would be happy and willing to give up their modern-day luxuries in favour of horticulture, building one’s own house and sewing one’s own clothes, regardless of sustainability and life security issues.

Surely you know all about creative destruction.

Take the switch from horse-drawn carts to motor vehicles. In the short term, cabbies and employees related to that industry suffered greatly but in the long term, everyone benefited and a whole new industry was created.

As with all destruction, there are casualties (the over-55s being particularly vulnerable) and these have to be helped, but as for the rest, if the economy is doing well and those former employees have the right skills, they are re-absorbed into the economy. If not, they aren’t (unless they know a Labour minister who can employ them as ‘a person of trust’).

Telling people to act before they are sacked is not being condescending. It is giving good advice. Many employees simply refuse to believe that they are the ones who will be sacked even though, mathematically, there is a very high probability that they will be.

The mechanics of a company are as you say but there must have been bad strategies somewhere which led to the bad administration of employees. Things don’t change overnight and problems that lead to sacking this amount of people must have been coming.

Management should have had enough time to reinstate them elsewhere and if they’re saying they’re reinvesting in what not, I am not impressed. The success of a company usually is part investment in your product and part investing in your people. If they got the people bit wrong then I believe they miscalculated their accounts.

I bet a greeting card full of expletives is really going to break the management’s heart—not.

He did not mention, of course, that this was due to the Gonzi government new power station and the consistent decrease in fuel costs all these months that were not reflected by his inept government in corresponding cuts in petrol and diesel prices.