At Slough House, the "Slow Horses" are given endless, dull paperwork, in hopes they'll give up and resign. At MI5, if you screw up in a big way––like become a blackout drunk or punch out another agent in the lunchroom or let highly confidential material fall into the hands of the press––then you end up being moved from Regent's Park to Slough House. Whatever you call it, and whatever the legal consequences, what we have in Mick Herron's Dead Lions is decidedly not just another day on the job. Though maybe being British, they'd go for understatement and call it something like a perturbation. In other words, not just a detour or even a frolic, but some whole new legal concept, like maybe ruckus, binge, spree, rampage, rumble or wingding. Now let's say the employer isn't the phone company, but Britain's MI5 intelligence service, the line worker is an entire small office building's worth of castoff agents gone rogue, and the damage ranges from severe embarrassment to kneecapping to gory death. But the second scenario is a frolic (in more ways than one), and the phone company isn't liable. The first scenario is a mere detour, which means that the worker was still sufficiently on the job to make the phone company liable for his accident.
Is the phone company liable for the worker's car accident? Well, this is where the delightfully-named "frolic and detour" principles of the law kick in. On the way back to the job, he blows through a stop sign and hits a car. Now let's say, instead, that the worker decides to ignore that boring packed lunch and drives over to the Bada Bing for a lunch of beer, chicken wings and live entertainment. So he drives home in the truck to get his lunch, and on the way back he blows through a stop sign and hits a car. Let's say a telephone line worker is out working in the phone company truck one day when he realizes he forgot his lunch at home.
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