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Here is one story retold,
albeit with a pithier ending:
From A. Steward:
Trouble with numbers
What happened: I work for a company that provides stewards for sporting events, mostly cricket, rugby and football.
Anyway, a week or so ago I was working in the south stand at Headingley during the Leeds Rhinos v Bradford Bulls local derby. (Rugby League).
There were 25 of us controlling a terrace that holds 8,500. The ticket office oversold the terrace by 2000, so there were around 10,000 people being stewarded by 25.
The stand was ram jam, people couldn't move. We were getting constant, non stop abuse from the crowd, it was like Hillsborough, but obviously nowhere near as bad.
During the game the attendance was announced over the tannoy as 22,000, which is the capacity. We all knew however the crowd was nearer 24,000, with all the extras in our stand.
In the debrief after the game we were told by a supervisor ''We need to be tighter on maintyaining aisles through the people on the terraces, especially as we weren't even at capacity today, we could have legally fitted another 400 people into that stand today''
What I said: Nothing, I was too tired to argue, plus it would have achieved nothing.
What I SHOULD have said: If that stand was 400 under capacity why did you announce a 22,000 capacity crowd?
L'esprit d'escalier
The French call it l'esprit d'escalier, "the wit of the staircase," those biting ripostes that are thought of just seconds too late, on the way out of the room-or even, to tell the truth, days later. It's happened to you: you've suddenly thought of just what would put your foe in his or her place, but past the time when the arrow could sting its victim. You've stewed in your own juice ever since, and the chance for singeing repartee is gone forever.
Or is it?
Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde may have had the rapier wit to tweak their tormentors on the spot, but for the rest of us, we offer the Internet's only L'esprit d'escalier web site!
