Please don’t think, we've done all of the thinking for you

Back in the office after training. Today's title is a memorable quote from one of the partners running the course. Makes you think, dunnit?

And now for those of you who missed it, an executive summary of this week’s Apprentice (sponsored by the Amstrad E3 Superphone).

• Act I – Candidates boast about themselves: "I can be very offensive if I need to be…Life isn’t always biscuits and sandwiches…This is what I deserve"
• Act II – Candidates pretend to like each other: "If it goes Pete Tong, I’m in the boys’ room with you mate…We work on every deal as if it’s the last day of the last year…we work until we bleed…I could not be happier"
• Act III – Candidates got stressed doing a bad job: "If everyone just shuts up - let me talk, yeah…it’s ground it’s ground it’s ground it’s okay it’s ground…no it isn’t ground"
• Act IV – Pre-boardroom blame gathering: "You’re really beginning to p*ss me off…don’t try to pin this sh*t on me…f*ckin’ idiot… He’s nice, but not outstanding in any way…not really cut out for the business world…We bought? No – you bought…He was weak"
• Act V – Enter Sralan, the pantomime bad guy, repeatedly mangling the present tense of the verb 'to be': "I tell yer sumfink wot’s definite, Certus is gonna bleedin’ ‘urt us…Let’s get down to the business of the task… is we usin’ the ‘we’ ‘ere? the proverbial ‘we’? … You went off nilly-willy…Was you in charge of the purchasin’?...This weren’t exactly the Man’attan project…It’s no good talkin’ after the ‘ors ‘as bolted"
• Act VI – Denouement: "Nice enuff fella as you are…yer fired…Please Sralan, don’t fire me, I’ll give you 110% (etc)"
• Act VI – Epilogue: Ruth bloody Badger (who’s lost some weight, but only around her face, somehow) completes the ritual humiliation of the loser on live TV, using a series of mixed up metaphors involving plates - “Stepping up to the plate is a poisoned chalice”; “You were forced up to the plate, and you were forced to eat” (wrong sort of plate, dufus, it’s a baseball analogy ). Crestfallen loser then gives insightful analysis of the reasons for their failure (“I should have made some decisive decisions”)

~The End~

Training

So I'm on shore leave for the time being, and spent today at a jolly corporate training facility (whose meeting rooms are named after irritating neo-fascist corporate goals such as 'Achievement' and 'Triumph') to learn about a global mandatory framework rollout.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but it's not such a bad course (although one of the facilitators keeps saying 'pacific' instead of 'specific', and I got into trouble for asking what or who an 'insights breakout' is), although a quick bit of mental arithmetic indicates that the grad trainee sitting on the same table as me was born in 1984. Jesus.

Anyway, part of the course inevitably involves one of those jolly corporate videos with jingling music, containing a mixture of stock corporate shots (people walking purposefully across office reception areas, groups of staff representing each colour, creed and religion under the sun chatting animatedly around a laptop - you've all seen it), senior people looking like rabbits caught in headlights saying important things badly, and a hand-picked selection of young, good looking junior staff mouthing platitudes about how fantastic everything is.

The problem is that said youngsters are all too obviously reading off a card held up behind (and slightly to the left of) the camera (the Managing Partner is almost certainly holding their family hostage to ensure they co-operate), rather in the style of those occasional and unfortunate POWs who are paraded on a tinpot dictatorship's TV screens, very unconvincingly telling the world that they've got it all wrong and the war should stop...


Just discovered facebook by the way. Having spent 10 minutes leafing through pages and pages of pimply youths who will graduate from Harvard in 2012, I suddenly feel very very old.

Carpe Diem friends, because sic transit gloria mundi

We're potentially getting into a pretty interesting time

The Apprentice is back tomorrow – check out this year’s crop of unpleasant obnoxious over-achievers, who still don’t get the basic premise of the show, which is that Sir Alan simply doesn’t like youngsters who are likely to be more successful than him, and especially those with more than 3 GCSEs. So he fires them.

On the subject of salesmen, as I barged my way into the station during rush hour this morning, a glossy piece of paper was thrust into my hand by a young buck lurking by the perpetually malfunctioning ticket machine. Such pieces of paper are usually ads for gyms, art fairs, bars, and most often of all the local Conservative party asking commuters to moan to them about the trains (you think I’m kidding?)

Not this time, however – I was the lucky recipient of something called a ‘CareersLife Outlook newsletter’ – written very much in the style of Jehovah’s Witness literature – lots of open ended, existential questions about the meaning of life and whether the reader has ever seriously considered just why the hell their pathetic little existence is so utterly pointless.

And is the same way that seemingly innocuous dinner parties held by the fervently religious result in a call to give your heart to the Lord over pudding, the leaflet invites the reader to ‘discover more’. And so I did.

After digging about on their website for five minutes (and ignoring the irritatingly clichéd quotes from ‘wise men’ such as, um, F.W. Nichol, liberally sprinkled all over it), it turns out that these fellows, who live in a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Portsmouth, have invented some certificates that they sell to their grateful clients. You start as an ICC, progress to ICDF, and if you’re really good, you make it to ILA. You then spent the rest of your life explaining to baffled interviewers what these initials stand for. I’ve forgotten already.

I’m guessing that the ICDFs mentor the ICCs, and the ILAs mentor the ICDFs, meaning the only thing needed to maintain the momentum is an endless supply of fresh candidates for the ICC. Which brings us neatly back to the chaps lurking in the station this morning. Brilliant.

A couple of questions, though:

• If you accept FG’s central thesis that most jobs are crap, and that they offer a failsafe superhighway to a better lifestyle, why do they spend their time hanging around stations doling out newsletters?


• Is there the slightest possibility that in order to become an ICC, ICDF and/or ILA, you may just have to pay them just a small sum of money?


• The website disclaimer claims (or perhaps disclaims) that ‘“FranklinWaugh” is a registered trademark of Franklin Waugh Ltd.’ Yes, well…this isn’t strictly true in a couple of key respects – firstly it isn’t a registered trademark, and secondly, FranklinWaugh Ltd doesn’t exist. As they themselves quote so memorably on their website: "Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters" - Albert Einstein.

To finish on a lighter note, here is a strong contender for the most boring wikipedia entry on earth. Any other ideas?

Purity? Balls.

Apparently a quiet news day for the Daily Telegraph today. Having a delightful (and forever chaste) daughter myself, I shouldn’t be writing this, but given the pictorial evidence above, let’s just say that certain young ladies will probably have fewer problems retaining their honour through those difficult teenaged years than others.

Remaining on the subject of religion (albeit tangentially), I found myself sitting cross legged on the floor of a church hall on Friday morning (it would take too long to explain why), fiddling around with plastic toys at the Baptist playgroup whilst keeping half an eye on the baby chimps.
Certain moaning right wing papers (most of which I read, and wholly agree with, of course) bang on incessantly about the feminisation of society, and the dire consequences of everything from the oestrogen in our drinking water to the lack of male role models for boys during their critical years of development due to the absence of fathers, male teachers etc.

Needless to say I was the only male older than 3½ in the room, and as is the case with most fathers, I soon mucked in and started building stuff with bricks, making fire engine noises etc. This soon attracted a small but loyal following of youngsters mistakenly referring to me as ‘daddy’. One of them even presented me with a small knitted ball, measuring perhaps 4 inches across, and judging by its weight, filled with old socks or tights. The sort of thing with no edges, no corners, indeed no potential to harm anyone at all. (You can see where this is heading).

“Wow!” I said, “Thank you!” (addressing those under 3 requires the liberal use of exclamation marks!!), “a ball!! Shall we throw it?”. And so I gently threw the ball maybe three feet into the air, with sixteen pairs of juvenile eyes following its climb and descent with a mixture of wonderment and delight. “Again!” someone said. So I threw it again, this time eliciting some giggles of pleasure from the assembled watchers. And then before I knew it…

… one of the old bats who runs the place (short hair, overweight, smells of moth ball, looks like a dog breeder) had waddled over, and said in a tone which could only be described as light-hearted-with-an-undertone-of-threat, “We don’t approve of that sort of thing here, and I’d be grateful if you could stop immediately,” as if I’d been teaching my young charges the rudiments of sodomy.

Well I mean, honestly. No wonder we trample all over God's earth destroying things when we're brought up by such people.

The gawky and lifeless sit around, innocent of any flicker of intelligence

Thanks to the late, great Anglo-Yank Alastair Cooke for today's blog title - an uncannily accurate description of beancounting towers, where I spend every waking hour. Well, I never thought I'd live to see this day, but the lovely, inclusive, collegiate, all-round good bloke Gordon Brown has actually increased my net wealth thanks to the latest budget, to the tune of 50.42pence per day. Gordon, I salute you. That will bring down my Stamp Duty bill on the new chimp enclosure (still in Tooting, alas) to just £27,366, a trifling tax bill which will only take an entire year of mortgage repayments to pay back.

Enough from me. I'm off to read up on just how the bloody hell I'm going to "handle the 'paradox of success.'" Nice one

Forecasts are forecasts really, you don't really know until you know

An Excel Chimp budget day scoop - insider knowledge of GB's final budget!

Benign debt paydown profile

So I was on the train home last night accompanied by the usual collection of South African accountants heading to Wimbledon and corporate brokers heading to Farnham when the woman standing next door got involved in one of those tedious high-volume one-sided mobile calls that make other commuters' lives hell. Said woman, however, was a very loud, very confident and very OK City yuppy, brimming with uber-confidence and desperate to tell the equally bumptious person on the other end of the phone how simply ghastly the weather was in New York at the weekend, and how it was absolutely dreadful that poor Jessica had just got pregnant after moving in with her boyfriend of nine months.

Then, the two blonde, tanned South African girls next to me on the other side started sniggering loudly, saying in a thick Gauteng accent "Does she know how ridiculous she sounds?" "Yah." Long live multiculturalism - your opportunity to hate people of all races equally...

Still, at least the South Africans are moving up the London social food chain

Crack on and give it our best shot

Finally signed off regional project on Friday, although not without a couple of calls in the middle of the night. Now facing the ghastly prospect of having to self-assess my performance using the 15-box 9-dimensional core competencies system as part of what I believe is called an 'interim appraisal'. Have a good week.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même run rate analysis

Here again in the spooky cold office with no-one else around and the lights going out every five minutes requiring a ridiculous dance which results in my iPod headphones getting tangled up with my mouse. Whoopee do, life in the M&A fast lane. The proverbial late night axe murderer charging hrough the darkened office could run at me, strike a lethal blow through my skull and get out of the building before the so-called firking motion-sensing lights finally blink into life.

Not sure I'm going to hang around to find out. I dream of sleep. Yet when I sleep I don't dream. Odd.

It's acceptable to punch someone who's resisting

So, it's approaching 4am, and I'm engrossed in part 8 of 'Deutsche Plus' on the BBC Learning Zone. So just who the f*ck sits at home learning German at this time of f*cking day, especially from idiot actors wearing pale brown shoes and stupid waistcoats?

It's deadline week, so I'm willing to bet that this won't be the last stupid bedtime this week.

Another gem on a conference call today:
Banker to PE guy: I'm assuming your process is running like a well-oiled sewing machine?
FD of target to no-one in particular: So which one of us is getting stitched up?

Guten nacht, alles.

Sales have increased due to increased sales

Overheard in a large all parties meeting:
"I don't think we're getting into struggling territory here - it's not as if someone turned off the purse strings."
Discuss.

Gross margins have been constant due to steady margins

Sleepwalking into mediocrity

A creeping reassessment of the trade-off between growth and inflation

Having had a rather longer-than-planned meeting with Messrs Pouilly-Fume (a niche player in the beverage space) yesterday evening, I’m not firing on all cylinders today. Luckily I’ve sought to get myself back into prime condition by eating and drinking from all of the main food groups this morning:

In a slight return to the long-forgotten ‘You’re ‘avin’ a graph mate’ feature (see example), the charts below summarise the deaths reported on Wikipedia last month:

• Using my finely honed data analysis and interpretation skills, I would give the following advice to those wishing to minimise the chances of death:
• Don’t be American – lots of them die, every day. Go for something a bit more edgy like Algerians – none of them died at all last month, apparently
• Keep a low profile on Fridays
• Avoid being in your 80s if you can help it – the grim reaper is particularly keen on this cohort.
• Don’t get cancer if you can help it

If you want something altogether more serious, I can highly recommend today’s in depth Guardian video feature, which covers the paradigm-shiftingly crucial topic of …Jamelia eating Marmite for the first time. Probably makes more comforting reading for your average Grauniad reader than the IMF hoofing Gordon Brown in the fiscal knackers in its latest report.

Yell at me again and I'll snap you like a twig

Made it to the end of the week. Only 80 hours of work after all that - don't know what the fuss is about.

A very good picture on the BBC today of Tony Blair doing an impression of Gordon Brown:

This is getting silly

Wonder if the Lotus Notes chick only has half a face.

Another night deep in Excel, although I'm in the comfort of home, watching a random Italian film on Film 4, in the vain hope that one of the actresses might get their kit off. It's the time of night when the ads are either government porn announcements, or premium rate safety announcements. Or something.

It's like being 17 again, except that I have to get up at 6am tomorrow and sort the children out, instead of lurking in bed until 1pm.

To tired to go on. Even the cat has gone to bed.

And it's still only Thursday...