COMMON sense has gone walkabout yet again. This time it was a pensioner and her ageing rabble-rouser friend who copped it for trying to buy a bottle of wine at their corner shop.

“I'll have a bottle of white,” she probably intoned to the wet-behind-the-ears shop assistant who was probably young enough to be her grandchild. No problem – as long as she had photo ID proving her age. So had she been Botox-ed? Was she wearing low-slung jeans and exposing her pierced belly button? Did she have a mobile clamped to her ear and was she chewing gum-cud as she spoke?

Er, no. She looked like my granny, with grey hair, some wrinkles and a cardie. Obviously under 18 then, and all set to go boozing with her mates on the local park bench.

Apparently it’s “company policy” to ask anyone and everyone wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes for proof of their age because “we take the matter of under-age drinking very seriously.” So seriously, in fact, that common sense has gone AWOL.

On One Stop website (for it is they) there’s a cosy little homily about how they aim to be the best store in the neighbourhood. It coos: “We open early in the morning so that you can pick up your newspaper and breakfast on the way to work. We stay open late into the evening to enable you to collect tonight’s meal and bottle of wine or one of our great beer deals.”

They forget to mention, though, that you’ll need your passport or photo driving licence to pass muster. Who knows, when they review their policy – as they undoubtedly must – they might even move One Stop further along the road to complete idiocy and get stuck into iris recognition and finger printing.

What is it about people who sit in boardrooms totally cushioned from the real world and decree that staff way down the food chain should implement daft, ill-conceived and draconian policies without any idea about how stupid they are?

It’s all very well taking a stand against under-age drinking, and no doubt local communities and neighbourhood policing teams will applaud them for it.

But to ask your granny for her birth certificate because heavens above, she might not be 18 (well, we already know that she isn't, don’t we?) and therefore lump her in the same group as spotty teenagers trying to pull a fast one is ludicrous. It’s not the staff's fault of course. They’re “only doing me job.” Probably hard enough at the best of times having to deal with said teens, but made worse by ridiculous, inflexible instructions from on high.

Mind you, they’re not alone. Who was the pea-brain airport employee, for example, who sat at his desk one day and came up with the instruction: “Passengers must board the plane via its doors?” No doubt it was company policy… Indian Railways, it seems, are also well in to firmly wagging the management finger. The following instruction to staff was spotted in Goa when our household’s Lower Management was there on business: “Spitting and littering in this room is strictly prohibited. This room is being inspected daily by the supervisor in charge. In case of any spit marks or littering noticed, suitable action will be initiated against all the occupants on the day when this is noticed.”

Talk about overkill. Whatever happened to “No spitting” or “Do not litter?”

But what really gets me are company senior managers who issue “Thou shalt not” instructions on pain of dismissal to the proletariat but undertake themselves the very thing they’ve banned their staff from doing.

A case in point was the IT manager of a big conglomerate explaining that there was a company policy blocking access to computer USB ports in a bid to prevent data theft. All very laudable apart from the fact that management were exempt “because they would find it quite unacceptable…”

There should be only one company policy – it’s very simple and doesn’t need a plethora of jobsworths to come up with screeds of pompous wording. For Charles Kingsley came up with it back in 1863 in The Water Babies – do as you would be done by. Sounds pretty much like a policy for life if you ask me.