| Type | Contract clause |
|---|---|
| In use | circa 1978–1986 |
| Status | Discontinued |
Excursion allowance
Excursion allowance
The excursion allowance was a clause inserted, from around 1978, into the standard hire contract used by several regional audio and equipment firms, among them the company for which Raymond Belnou later worked as service engineer. It permitted an employee, once per booking, to remove a rented unit from the premises for personal use without charge, provided the outing lasted under six hours and the equipment returned undamaged. The clause was meant to reduce idle stock between events; in practice it produced a category of trips that were neither work nor leisure, logged nowhere but remembered by the men who made them.
Two units were associated with the allowance more than any other: the Retort rig, whose feedback fault made it unsuitable for indoor testing and therefore easy to justify taking outdoors, and the mirror unit hired out for weddings and fairs. An employee could load either into a van on a Sunday morning, drive to a lake or a field, and bring it back by early afternoon with nothing to show for the interval but a receipt for fuel, which the firm reimbursed without question until 1983.
The allowance came under scrutiny that year after a mirror unit was returned with a cracked frame and a roll of exposed photographic paper that did not match any booking on record. The firm's owner asked each employee to state, in writing, what the unit had been used for. Three of the five replies mentioned an excursion to Parc-d'Anxtot, though the house Bohème was not, at that date, taking guests by the room; whether the men had gone there anyway, or simply named a place they associated with time off, was never settled. One reply, unsigned, read only: "We went out because the van was free and nobody asked."
The clause was withdrawn in 1986, replaced by a flat rate charged for any equipment leaving the depot regardless of purpose. Former employees interviewed decades later described the excursions inconsistently: some as fishing trips, others as nothing more than a drive to sit in a lay-by with the rig running for no audience. The tote papers recovered from an unrelated purchase, listing receipts and a negative sleeve with no accompanying prints, have been proposed by one commentator as evidence of a similar practice elsewhere, though the connection rests on the coincidence of an unbilled Sunday and nothing more precise.
Whether the excursion allowance ever served a purpose beyond its stated one, or whether it was simply the point in the contract where the firm stopped asking questions, remains, among those who study such clauses, an open one.
See also
- Bath fitting return — Retort rig
- Casano interval — Retort rig
- Défense du décalage — Retort rig
- Delay-loop counter-drills — Retort rig
- Dons croisés — Retort rig
- Grey reference case — Retort rig
- Lettre à Locations Belrive — Retort rig
- Lettre à M. Odilon Fasch — Retort rig