From a ledge opposite the City Chambers, The Sensible One has been watching Glasgow try to solve a problem everyone agrees is real.
The old pay system discriminated against mainly women workers. It had to change.
Fair enough.
The replacement, though, would leave around 11% of staff worse off, with some facing cuts of roughly £11,000 a year. And when talks broke down, the council reached for a fairly dramatic tool: dismissing around 23,000 non-teaching staff and offering them new contracts.
At which point she stopped listening to the slogans and started sniffing the air.
Because “we need a fairer system” sounds perfectly sensible.
“Some of you will lose thousands of pounds” sounds rather less so.
And “if you do not agree, we may sack almost everyone and start again” has a definite aroma to it.
The council says the current structure cannot continue because it is discriminatory. The unions say staff should not be made poorer in the process of fixing it. Talks resumed after the fire-and-rehire plan was paused, with the Scottish Government involved, but the dispute remains unresolved.
From up here, the strange part is how quickly humans can turn one unfair system into another argument about fairness.
The council is trying to fix historic inequality.
The unions are trying to stop workers losing money.
Both of those things can be true at the same time.
What is harder to swallow is the idea that fairness somehow requires thousands of people to sit at home wondering whether January brings a new contract, a smaller wage packet, or both.
The Sensible One has a rule for moments like this.
If everyone keeps using the word “fair” and nobody can explain who is actually paying for it, keep sniffing.
Something usually smells like shite.
