Excel chimp: crunching numbers, counting beans

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH

2007-07-25T02:07:00.000+01:00

The management accounts don't agree to the management accounts

2007-06-26T01:09:00.000+01:00

(Here) is the original.

Up with a spring in my step and a song in my heart at oh-six-thirty hours this morning, after four and half hours of refreshing sleep following a white knuckle ride through some formatting changes in the current year management accounts which had rendered like-for-like analysis on a comparable basis all but impossible.
Having left the chimplets early (refusing to eat their Cheerios despite their grandparent’s best efforts), I arrived at Big Office House at the unusually early time of 8.40am, presenting a golden opportunity to get a flying start to what will inevitably be a long and painful week.

I practically skipped into the male changing rooms (the only part of the UK currently over 30 degrees C in this most Novemberish of Junes), then suddenly f_cking realised that I’d f_cking left my f_cking shoes at f_cking home.

Imagine a plucky chap in the First World War catching a Jerry bullet through the shoulder before he’d even got to the top of the trench ladder and you’ll sense what I was sensing as the realisation hit me.

Grey suit, subtle checked shirt, discreet tie…sweaty ankle socks, O’Neill trainers. Not quite the ‘appropriate business casual attire’ for the values-compliant office environment.

The next forty minutes (the entire time available to prepare for the first conference call of the day, and then some) were spent pounding the streets in search of a shoe shop that was open – it’s surprising how difficult it is to find one in such a footwear-rich place as London. After 10 minutes, I was jealously eyeing shoe-wearers as they blithely breezed past, inanely unaware of how lucky they were. After 20 minutes, I was actively looking for anyone with size 11 feet and a semi-decent pair of shoes to punch out cold, grab his footwear, and tip his lifeless body into the river. Luckily a local loafer-monger eventually obliged, and I finally made it back to the office by taxi, some 10 minutes late for the entire week.

And I haven’t caught up since.

Right, time for lunch, then I have meeting at Bulge Bracket Trust LLC.

Keep buying. Dilute the sonofabitch. I want every orifice in his body flowing red.

2007-06-24T16:19:00.000+01:00

This was originally going to be a grimly ironic post about the longest day (summer solstice, some three days ago), involving some sardonic humour about only getting three hours' sleep a night at present. Trouble is, I haven't had time to write it.

Next week requires me to do a month's work in the space of four days (albeit with a little assistance from a regional junior chimp) whilst the boss is on holiday, which I'm really looking forward to.

I find myself in the unusual position of being whatever the equivalent of 'triangulated' is for four items (squargulated? quadrangulated? Strangulated is perhaps the most apt) between no less than four powerful women at present - one who is covering for me on a project I can't spend any time on, one at the private equity house I'm working for, one who's standing in for the boss, and of course Mrs Chimp, who's less than delighted that I'm not home for 21 hours out of 24 at present.

The problem with powerful women is that they all need constant updates as to what I'm up to. I could easily fill the 35 hours (ha!) of my working week with progress meetings, to do lists and conference calls. Trouble is, I'd never get the work done.

And to top it all off, Gordon Brown will be running the country by the end of the week. Hating to tempt fate, can things get any worse?

Rip their throats out and put them in your garbage compactor.

2007-06-20T13:21:00.000+01:00

Two unrelated stories about dogs and bicycles today.

As I rounded a corner on a cycle path on Tooting Bec Common, I was sharply rebuked by a plummy mummy in a Barbour jacket, whose black Labrador was squatting in the middle of the cycle path taking the most enormous dump (this in a 152 acre park, with ample opportunities for less anti-social crapping). Apparently the woman was concerned that by exercising my right to use the cycle path, I might disturb her canine pal in mid, um, movement. Ptchah.

Second dog tale (or tail) – I overtook, with a sense of amazement and respect, a gent clad entirely in tweed, riding a creaky old bicycle with one hand, and holding the lead of his faithful hound, who was trotting contentedly along beside him, in the other. They wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of those bucolic villages one finds in Jeeves and Wooster stories (I seem to remember that Chuffy Chufnell lived in Chufnell Regis – that sort of place). He most certainly did look out of place in the bus lane of the A3036.

Currently engaged with our German, er, colleagues on a couple of projects. I love the fact that absolutely everyone in Germany is a Professor or Doctor. I remember a TS trainee (aged c.32) in Germany a few years ago who had a PhD in something (other than accounting, I should think), spending an entire day looking for operating expenses in the balance sheet.

If you’re an accountant, you’ll understand this. If you’re not – thank your lucky stars.

So what’s on your mind kimosabe? Why am I listening to you?

2007-06-19T15:42:00.001+01:00

Cycling home at 1.30am is somehow an exhilarating experience – the streets smell different in the absence of exhaust fumes. There was no-one around other than a startled fox, a couple of chaps in Balham loading money from a van into an ATM, and a couple of other chaps on the other side of the street looking as if they had plans to take the cash back out of the ATM and put it into their own van. Even the chav youths had gone home to bed, happy in a Red Stripe and skunk haze.

Went to a deal meeting this morning, attended by two senior finance dudes rejoicing in the names of Mr Sale and Mr Price. It’s not often that such a golden opportunity for a joke arises in a deal meeting. No-one made the joke, of course. Someone did, however, deliberately and with malice aforethought use the phrase “this is a starter for £200million.”

“The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a
bomb on his body he would be right to do so.”

Is anyone else struggling to reconcile the two halves this statement?

Speaking of struggling to reconcile things, I’m heading back to the ‘basis of preparation’ note on page 174 of the VDD report.

If it looks as good as on paper, we're in the kill zone. We lock and load pal...

2007-06-18T23:23:00.000+01:00

You have about a month's worth of Gordon Gekko quotes coming up as blog titles. The guy was, and remains, an absolute legend.

A happy evening spent alone in the office, dancing around like a tw&t every 5 minutes when the motion-sensitive lights go out. Really looking forward to riding home at midnight through the darkened streets of the capital.

Still, iPod random has just served up 'Candy Girl' by New Edition (Bobby Brown's pre-pubescent outfit before he got into unwholesome things), so life can't be all that bad.

Are we part of it? We better be, pal, or I'm gonna eat your lunch for you

2007-06-18T16:04:00.000+01:00

Above is evidence, should any be needed, that the current fashion of being inclusive and insisting that the consumers of news websites 'have your say' is an utter waste of everyone's time.

Do you have a view on this view? Would you like to 'have your say' about the editorial policy of Excel Chimp? No f*cking chance. P*ss off.

Chimping tennis report

2007-06-18T06:55:00.000+01:00

So it was Fathers' day (in the UK, at least) yesterday, so in a spirit of family solidarity, we dumped the chimplets with the nanny and spent the day at the finals day of the laughably re-branded 'Artois Championship' at the Queen's Club. I guess they're trying to move away from the violent drunk / wife beater image of 'Stella', which used to be the tournament's name. It's all rather academic at somewhere like Queen's - the ruling classes are more likely to get into a heated discussion about whose son is better at sailing after a jug of Pimms than get into a full-blown-paramedic-requiring punch up after 8 pints of industrial lager.

As for the tennis - the men's final was surprisingly good (Queen's matches are usually 6-2 6-2 walkovers, completed in 40 minutes) - Andy Roddick, who despite, according to my source, being rather unpopular at the Surbiton Lawn Tennis Club for being a bad loser (so terribly British to have a detailed etiquette of losing), overcame a Frenchman in three sets, taking a little over two hours, although it boiled down to a handful of crucial points. Some sort of lesson about the arbitrariness of victory and defeat, but I'm not sure what. We then watched a dull doubles final which included the hilariously-titled partnership of Bryan & Bryan. Simply add 'LLP' to the end, and you have a regional accounting firm.

A new element of circus was added to match by the introduction of 'Hawkeye', some sort of electronic gizmo that tells you definitively whether the ball was in or out. So, if your ball is called out by the line judge and you think they're wrong, you stick your finger in the air to appeal the call. The crowd then looks up in expectant silence at the big scoreboard, which draws a pretty picture of the point, and flashes up whether the ball was in or out.

As an investigative accountant, I applaud the triumph of fact over opinion - it's a peculiarly British approach to sport (I think we invented tennis, didn't we?) that teaches players that it's more important to accept a blatantly wrong decision than to upset convention by challenging it.

The problem is that each player only gets three calls per set if they subsequently turn out to be wrong - which is fine if it stops players chancing it and challenging every call, but what if you challenged three calls which turned out to be very marginally OK (there was literally one pixel between the ball and the line on a couple of the calls yesterday), then don't have the opportunity to challenge a fourth? Stand by for law suits. At least half of the challenges made resulted in the original call being over-ruled - makes you wonder about the quality of the line judges. Why not ditch the lot of 'em and have instantaneous electronic scoring? Think of the payroll cost savings.

A structural realignment resulting in a shifting geographic footprint

2007-06-15T12:37:00.000+01:00

If you have more time on your hands than me, here is a list of Excel Chimp’s cousins in the corporate blogosphere. Here also is a good piece on BoJo’s blog about Tony Blair laying into the press. I, too, would much rather be regulated by public scorn than by Tony Blair.

Although not much of an ornithologist, the recent return of the watery English sun has brought the welcome return of the lesser spotted Pendulous Booby to Clapham Common. These wonderful young specimens always travel in pairs, and although nested in layers of cotton and fleece for much of the year, generally spend these warm summer months nestling in their summer home of tight lycra. Several prime mating pairs out and about on the common this morning. Time for a cold shower.

It needs to get done yesterday. Don't laugh, I'm serious.

2007-06-14T11:07:00.001+01:00

Two variations of an old joke

#1
Q: Why did the due diligence accountant spend the best part of a month considering crossing the road, analysing in great detail the likely consequences of crossing the road (or not crossing the road, or crossing a slightly different road, or crossing half way across the road and re-assessing what to do next based on current performance), attending endless conference calls about crossing the road, preparing high level summaries of ‘initial thoughts’ about crossing the road, but never actually crossing the farking road, and therefore not actually getting paid for it?

A: Because that’s what the private equity firm told him to do

#2
Q: Why did the due diligence accountant cross the next road?

A: The due diligence accountant is not, repeat NOT crossing any more roads until a signed letter of engagement is in place to underwrite the costs.

Never mind the quality, feel the width

2007-06-13T23:30:00.001+01:00

Well, I've been playing the due diligence game since Sultan Hisamuddin Alam Shah , Sultan of Selangor , died after a reign of 55 years, and I've heard a few things in my time. But today, in a meeting with a gang of private equiteers (or equity privateers?), I heard the phrase 'detuned model' no less than four times, without ever previously having heard it in my life. Makes one think of an old piano or somesuch. See if you can get in into your next 'Summary of key findings' - spread the word.

Speaking of private equity, the not-too-subtle class warriors of the no-experience-of-work-outside-government Left have got their teeth into the PE industry at present, to such an extent that the fellow who runs the BVCA is heading for a bit of his own downsizing medicine. I'm not quite clear what 'enjoying tax advantages' actually means. Is it better for a UK-based PE guy to pay 10% of his UK earnings to Gordon Brown, or bugger-all because he's moved to Liechtenstein. At the risk of sounding like a Thatcherite, I don't see the problem with the UK government not cynically pissing about with the law to target bright, profit making people, who'll be on the first Learjet out of the UK in any event on the day the law's enacted.

Had the dubious honour of turning down an interview candidate for a job today. Funny how a mouse-click made in a nanosecond determines the course of another's destiny. In the final analysis, we're all lines in an HR spreadsheet. God knows, I've seen enough.

An amazing site today - one of Ken's 18m long buses which had jumped a red light on a roundabout had managed simultaneously to stop all traffic on each of three main roads in Central London for what seemed like 10 minutes. It's like building a dam across a river. In fact, if I wanted to bring London to its knees, I would only need six or so devoted followers to hijack a bendy bus each and park it across a main approach road to zone 1 to completely paralyse the capital.

Enough for now. Time to get on with the FY07 outturn analysis.

The brand is positioned to alienate non core customers

2007-06-12T22:25:00.001+01:00

Well, today’s blog really was going to be a humdinger, sprinkled with a light dusting of the wittiest, most incisive, laugh-out-loud hilariously cutting stories about what goes on behind closed doors in the secretive world of financial due diligence.

Was I write, because as my finger was hovering over the Publish Post button, one of the junior chimplets, having crept up (yes, a toddler can apparently creep) behind me, switched off the plug connected to the adapter connected to the PC and yelled ‘STOP!’ with a flourish. Thus died my meisterwerk. This was no accident. Sinister forces are at work.

Instead, and as a late replacement, I bring you my two year old childrens’ considered opinions on the latest Ralph Lauren advertising campaign, which they came across whilst leafing through The Economist this morning (I wish I was joking):

Somewhat remiss on the blogging recently, for the following reasons:

Mr A from private equity house 'M' wants me to work full time for him for the next two weeks on project '1', and
Mr B from the same private equity house also wants me to work for him, on a different aspect of project '1'. Mr A and Mr B don't really speak to each other much, and
Ms C from the same private equity house wants me to work for her on project '2'. She has no idea as to what Mr A and Mr B (who sit perhaps ten feet away) are up to, and
Partner AA (my boss on projects '1' and '2') has also signed me up for project '3'. This also involves my full time attention, and
Director AB needs me to take an active involvement in finalising the report for project '4'. This is what I've spent this evening doing, sitting in the garden with a large glass of red (and 'doing a Gordon' as listening to the Arctic Monkeys on one's iPod is now known) as the police helicopters above basked in the Streatham twilight, and
Director AC, who, on the basis of never speaking to me or working with me, seems to have formed the view that I don't do any work, has lined me up for project '5', an IPO of a flaky company which will take me 1/2 way around the world for the best part of a month.

So if I take on project '5', projects '1' to '4' will go to hell. If I don't, Director AC will blackball me at the next promotion round for being lazy and incompetent. This is why I spent the cycle ride home wondering whether there's a timesheet code for 'General worrying about work'. There isn't. So 'Admin' will have to take another pounding.

An endless digital forest of mediocrity

2007-06-12T00:14:00.000+01:00

Spent most of the day trying to rally sufficient pieces of paper to satisfy the anti-money laundering bureaucracy, which is spiralling out of control. Some 12 emails and 200 sheets of A4 paper later, I may just be permitted to work with a company that has been a client of our US firm for 10 years.

Made the mistake of riding home during jogging rush hour - acres and acres of sweaty flesh encased in lycra wobbling around London's parks. Nice.

My head has turned to spinach having spent the evening reading two Information Memoranda on completely separate businesses, which have somehow become the same thing in my fevered mind. Although modesty prevents me from mentioning actual sectors, it's a bit like reading in quick succession (accompanied by a number of beers) about a sheep farm then a credit card business, and failing to remember whether the fall in mutton output is due to increased repayment deliquency by the lambs, or poor weather affecting the feeding habits of the Buy Now Pay Later customers.

Enough already.

A joke to end with:

Q: What do you call a French solider who chucks a hand grenade into a '70s kitchen?

A: Linoleum Blownapart. Tres drole.

We're not looking to max out on the leverage

2007-06-08T11:32:00.000+01:00

Looks as if Dubya’s got a case of the brad pitts at the G8 Summit. Can’t help wondering whether he deliberately ate a bunch of oysters left on a radiator in order to avoid a handbagging (not this meaning, I hope) on climate change from just about everybody else there.

Now we none of us like discussing the painful subject of fees with clients (the product of our labours generally comes in at a bag o’ sand per page, before expenses - all of those Deliverance dinners and 2am cabs). So how about settling them with a game of spoof? Billionaire Mike Ashley did, and he lost. Whereas £200k is a mere bagatelle to Ashley, the dude from Merrill would have had the hell of a meeting with their risk management people (assuming that they have any) had he lost.

There’s very little that hasn’t already been said about this week’s Apprentice – we all knew that Sralan’s East end henchman probably aren’t completely au fait with the requirements of the UK’s sex discrimination legislation, but trust the good old bloody moaning Indie to bring the TUC and the Equal Opportunities Commission into the fray. It all comes down to the old question – what’s wrong with being sexy?

The strange thing was just how much of an unpleasant cow the blonde founder of Ultimo pants was on the aftershow – she seemed to get off on telling everyone what a totally brilliant and successful millionaire she is. Not a pleasant character trait. She also proudly declared that everyone who works for her loves her. Yeah, right.

The boring 2012 logo debate rumbles on. I wonder if any of you remember that the sinister and pointless Wolff Olins who are behind all this have also been let loose a couple of times in our own fair profession.

Firstly, these are the guys who came up with the brilliant idea of PricewaterhouseCoopers (all one word, no punctuation, annoying small ‘w’, capital ‘C’ without a space before it), which I should think is mis-spelt one third of the time it appears in print, some nine years later.

The comble de joie, however, was renaming PwC consulting ‘Monday:’ (don’t forget the “:”) at a cost of £75m. The rebrand lasted a grand total of 50 days (a cool £1.5mil a day) before being re-re-branded to something along the lines of 'IBM Global Services' or something equally dull.

But if you’d like to see an example of a tragically misunderstood branding exercise, check out the logo of the Brazilian Institute for Eastern Studies. It certain rams the message home.

The subject of sore posteriors leads one nicely onto the subject of cycling to work – yes, the chimp bike has been dusted off for the first time in about 8 months. The battle for London’s streets continues unabated – Ken’s latest wheeze at Vauxhall is for cyclists and pedestrians to ‘share space’ when crossing a major road junction. This results in chaos, since both parties, having followed separate cheery diktats from City Hall that walking and cycling are very good things, are filled with righteous indignation that the other party is getting in their way.

In the same way, Wandsworth BC has somewhat undermined its policy of splitting paths between cyclists and pedestrians with a big white stripe by nailing signs saying ‘Cyclists must giveway’ (oneword, apparently) on every lamp post. So if I am on what appears to be a cycle path and a pedestrian throws himself under my wheels, is it my fault for not givingway? Idontknow.

Life was perhaps a little simpler when, in the absence of millions of detailed lists setting out everyone’s rights, people had to behave with common courtesy and consideration towards each other without bleating and reaching for a rule book.

God, it's so boring to spend so much time moaning. Back to drafting initial comments on the SPA.

"Not even the Germans have gone this far, " he said

2007-06-07T15:08:00.001+01:00

The proposition seems to be fast inching its way into a preferred position

2007-06-05T11:09:00.000+01:00

Today’s column is dedicated to a chimping ex-colleague who was recently stabbed in the leg on his birthday by a gentleman as keen as mustard to relieve him of his wallet and consumer durables. When he reported the crime (I believe that stabbing someone in the leg remains a criminal offence, even in multi-cultural London), he was pulled up by Old Bill for using the phrase ‘mugging’ – apparently this is no longer politically correct – ‘street robbery’ is the currently-acceptable terminology. Anyway, get well soon, me ole mucker.

Back in my counting house after a week spent packing things into boxes, then unpacking them again. Our new street is apparently much smarter (according to Up My Street, anyway), although I’m not so sure. If the cars parked on a London street are a social barometer, our former street was, to use the fib still beloved by estate agents, 'up and coming.' The M-reg Fords and Nissans were gradually being replaced by soft-top Porsche and Audis, whereas in our new street, practically everyone (including ourselves) has a beaten up estate car or MPV equipped with mandatory child seats, cat blinds and single juvenile Wellington boots on the biscuit-crumb-laden floor. Not a low-slung coupe to be seen.

Anyway, the cat is completely freaking out, and I still haven’t got used to the idea that I now have a ‘wet room’ (“The Modern Way to Shower!”) in my house.

So here’s a strange comment from the Times website yesterday, hidden away in the inevitable ‘have your say’ column appended to a somewhat dull article about computers.

The BBC is struggling to interpret the news that Vlad “Bad Muthaf*cka” Putin is about to point his rusty nukes back in our direction, leading a number of people in the US to suggest that the yanks should pull out of Europe entirely. Why? Well, the Beeb is sometimes rather keen on presenting the US as a bunch of aggressive morons, and the Russians as our somewhat misunderstood best friends. Difficult to put a positive spin on Europe being left adrift in the hands of a bunch of ex-spies from Leningrad hell bent on re-establishing the Soviet-era political system. Still, apparently all Vlad wants is respec’ (as they call it at the other, less smart, end of my new street), which suggests that he’s simply a jumped up mugger (sorry, ‘street robber’) with intercontinental ballistic missiles instead of bling and a shank.

Strange how détente has moved on, though – Russia’s reason for not attacking us is no longer for fear of swift annihilation at the hands of the Americans, but rather that Western Europe is its major energy customer, and therefore a valuable source of wealth. Best to wait until they’ve bled us dry of a few hundred billion more petrodollars until they let the SS20s loose, I guess.

Silly government initiative of the day? ‘Britain Day’. Great idea, but for the fact that the Scots and the Welsh hate the very guts of the English, mainly because we have no idea who or where they are, and really don’t care because it doesn’t matter. Oh, and we pay them millions and millions for sitting around moaning about us. As for Northern Ireland – well, I should think that participation in the celebrations may not be wholeheartedly embraced across the constituency of communities…

You’ve no doubt read that Michael Moore’s latest number (about the failings of the US healthcare system) holds up our own dear NHS as an exemplar of all that is great about healthcare. I don’t suppose that I’m entirely objective - Mrs Chimp has spent two years waiting to be allowed onto the waiting list for the waiting list for a post-birth operation that for bureaucratic reasons is classed as ‘cosmetic surgery’, thereby placing her behind dozens of fatso South London chavs waiting for government-funded boob jobs and tummy tucks (breathe, man, breathe) – but this is perhaps evidence that Mr Moore has finally descended into madness.

I was going to do a moaning piece about the recently launched London 2012 logo, but due to the fact that a gentleman amusingly called Marcel Knobil (a ‘brand expert’, apparently) doesn’t like it, it gets my vote.

And finally, have you ever wished you could have been a Nazi soldier sweeping majestically across the cornfields of the Urals in an open topped Kubelwagen in the glorious summer of ’41, with the wind blowing through your clipped blonde hair as the communist untermenschen scatter before you? Look no further. All you have to do is buy one, get it to the Polish border, and drive Eastwards at speed with a bit of Wagner on the multiplay CD. Sorted.

In a 50-50 deal, he keeps the hyphen

2007-05-29T16:09:00.000+01:00

Back from a typical British Bank Holiday Monday – it pis*ed down with rain non-stop for 36 hours, and we went to Ikea in the sensible estate car with the children. Anyone who describes themselves as having a ‘GSOH’ should be required to spend an hour in the Ikea canteen at lunchtime.

The best thing by far was the sight of a disapproving-looking BCBG lady of a certain age (the sort who detests everyone who shops at places like Ikea, despite doing so herself) walking with two cups of boiling tea across the middle of the children’s play area, and stopping to glare and tut angrily at each of the four dozen children who came within 10 feet of her. Not sure how she failed to spot the very large sign reading ‘Children’s Play Area.’

Still, Mrs Chimp got lots of new house stuff, the children managed to blag a Barnslig Flodhäst and a Korall Sköldpadda between them, and as for me, I actually quite enjoyed my lukewarm meatballs in strange beige sauce and adding a " ’ " with a green felt-tip to a toy originally marked “My Dolls Bed.”

Last entry for a while due to impending house move (it will somehow take BT, the Great Satan of UK telecoms, three weeks to re-connect broadband). I'm even more gloomy than usual about the imminent stamp duty bill of more than £27,000, which, being a dull accountant, I’ve worked out will cost one whole year of (very large) mortgage repayments to repay. More depressing still is the cost over the life of the mortgage - £50 fecking grand (including interest) or a fiver a day every single day until 2032, by which time I’ll be knocking on 60 years old. It gives me a warm feeling inside to know that I’ll still be paying Gordon Brown’s bloody tax bill long after he’s enjoyed a long taxpayer-subsidised retirement and turned up his toes.

For those of you who think that the ‘Golden Triangle’ is something to do with blonde girls and waxing, think again. Surprised to see that my own alma mater is included in this list.

Look out Blighty, Wholefoods Market, the yankee-doodle-yuppie-foodie-nirvana, is coming to London. I’ve never been there and therefore shouldn’t judge. That said, all the guff on the website about how green they are is somewhat undermined by the massive number of large trucks parked in front of the store in picture on the homepage. (##STOP PRESS - THEY'VE CHANGED THE PHOTO SINCE LAST FRIDAY - THE TRUCKS HAVE MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED##)

Have you read the latest Cameronian nonsense about trading permits for 'social bads'? Setting aside (if you can) the use of 'bad' as a noun, can you imagine yet another office in Central London filled with expensive people government employees earnestly establishing the relative value of each ‘bad’? How many jam doughnuts equate to driving a car? Is taking the lift instead of walking better or worse than watching reality TV? How many M&S sea bass fillets ‘from the azure waters of Greece’ would be as ‘bad’ a ‘bad’ as a Jaffa Cake? Only the man in Whitehall knows.

The few remaining Poles that aren’t living in London are embroiled in a very important debate – are the Teletubbies promoting an inappropriate alternative lifestyle choice? If it’s found to be true, expect the Teletubbies, Right Said Fred and Peter Tatchell to get pulped by a bunch of nationalists in camouflage t-shirts and thrown into prison, leaving the nationalists to run riot in Teletubbyland.

And finally, for you dismal scientists out there, The Economist’s screen saver is back!

We must either love each other, or we must die

2007-05-25T10:50:00.001+01:00

The English summer is upon us, which means that it’s cloudy, there are millions of tourists milling about taking pictures of each other, and of course the office air conditioning is broken. The facilities people have instructed us to sit completely still in semi-darkness until things cool off in October.

I know it's boring to bang on about the nanny state, but it's difficult not to get irritated with the powers that be for pronouncing a complete ban on pre-baby boozing, despite there being nothing as inconvenient as "evidence that a couple of units once or twice a week will do any harm” to an unborn baby. Luckily, today’s advice is “not based on new scientific evidence.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as dull, risk averse and sensible as any middle class chartered accountant; it’s just that I would be very surprised indeed if the small minority of mums-to-be who get bladdered when they’re up the duff have even heard of the Department of Health, let alone paid any heed to their guidelines, irrespective of whether these are based on scientific evidence, or simply the insatiable urge to tell people what to do. Here endeth the lesson.

Not entirely unlinked to the above is Boris Johnson’s article about happiness in today’s Spectator (read by home county Nazis in tweed), which is the journalistic equivalent of foie gras en brioche. Quite simply fabulous. Before you dive in, though, you might need to mug up (well I had to, anyway, what with my patchy state education) on the following:

reductionist
The emergence of Athenian democracy
TRUD
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle
eudaemonic (a crisp fiver to anyone who can successfully weave that into their next conference call)
pseudo-utilitarianism
jacquerie
NEET
Hesiod
asphodel

One small point, though – I’m somewhat sceptical that the study of advanced mathematics constitutes an “activity that is truly happiness-inducing”, but then the plurality of maths teachers at my school were sarcastic alcoholics.

And finally, how on can anyone at the bloody moaning Indie think that anyone at all would possibly find this picture of a house remotely interesting, let alone front-page fodder? Bloody puritans. Time to bunk off and read some Hesiod, people.

I think we need a 3-way with Philip

2007-05-24T17:26:00.000+01:00

Appearing in a reality TV show? Need for a pre-pixellated shirt? Your problem is solved.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time this monring (New York may be a city that never sleeps, but it doesn’t do conference calls before 2pm UK time) choosing a new fridge freezer, which is exactly as dull and irritating as it sounds.

Amongst reams of data on the height, noise levels, number of egg holders, gross capacity and number of thermostats, there’s something called an ‘Energy rating’, which is a fine idea, the only problem is that practically every fridge freezer on earth is rated ‘A’, so why bother? It's a bit like GCSE results. Anyways, the damn thing (salad crisper an’ all) is being delivered next week. So sorry to be so tedious.

Some sort of coke smuggling gag here, but I can’t quite think of it.

A couple of annoying uses of corporate English that keep cropping up around here:

The verb ‘talk to’ employed to describe anything other than one human being addressing another human being. Example: “These are the slides we’ll be talking to during the debrief.”

The use of “It’s all about” without bothering to explain what ‘it’ is. Example: “it’s all about celebrating our values”. What is, for heaven’s sake?

Alex in the Torygraph is mid-way through an excellent run of Wall St inspired gags (here, here and here). Always remember friends, “it's not a question of enough. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another.”.

I tried that one with my mortgage company. They transferred £275 from one perception (my account) to another (their account) for the pleasure of allowing me to repay my debt early, the swine.

Next time you’re the bee-atch of some PE guy half your age and he gets all hostile on you, try the following gem from Homer’s Odyssey (c.800BC): “think twice before you challenge me; or once you have roused me, old as I am I’ll dye your lips and breast with your own blood.” At least you know where you are with the guy. Here is the whole lot if you’ve got a moment.

Speaking of warriors, a number of people have recently mentioned a fellow called Dan Millman, who has made piles and piles of cash marketing the concept of the ‘peaceful warrior.’ Not having read the guy’s oeuvre, I can’t comment on it, but it’s fair to say that I will always be slightly suspicious of someone who signs off his blog ‘Good journeys.’

Good adding stuff up and making it into graphs.

It’s seldom difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman and a ray of sunshine

2007-05-23T17:35:00.000+01:00

We all know that Gordo is a miserable sod, but this is ridiculous. The most annoying thing about these adverts, currently plastered on every billboard and bus in London, is the phrase ‘go smokefree’ (NB no space). A most unusual verb:

Q: Good morning, and where are you going this fine day?
A: I’m going smokefree, of course.

Still, at least the government’s 3,200 press officers are earning their salaries. I’m no public sector accountant, but I love the way in which the £322m paid by me and my fellow citizens in 2006, to tell us what someone else thinks we need to know, is somehow ‘turnover’. In such an opaque world, no wonder no-one has any idea how much the government is spending, sorry, earning.

Apparently the fine city of Leeds "struts across England's urban stage like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever". Good to see that the British sense of humour is alive and kicking.

A distinctly underwhelming compromise

2007-05-22T16:08:00.001+01:00

A moderately diverting piece about randomness and luck from the beeb. It makes you wonder why you bother in life, doesn’t it? But then apparently lucky people make their own luck, so keep at it, compadres.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading a competitor’s financial due diligence report today, which contains the following gems in amongst numerous typos and split infinitives:

“corporate business generally relates to companies”
“the company reduced prices to counter declining sales. Unfortunately, this had the effect of increasing sales”

I suddenly realise how painful it must be to be a client of someone like me.

Next time you have a hangover, don’t take any crap from your colleagues, attribute your less-than-stellar performance to ‘brain fog’ brought on by gluten intolerance. You needn’t tell them that the gluten was in fact in the pitta of your 3am kebab.

Our friends at Google are really getting into the habit of banning stuff. This time it’s essay writing websites, although the ban hasn’t quite started yet, it seems. I'm sure that there's far more unsavoury stuff to be banned from Google searches (especially with Moderate SafeSearch switched off) ahead of a bit of innocent exam cheating...

I wonder if there’s a gap in the market for a financial due diligence report writing website? Hmmm.

Macro paradigms, or epoch-making overall constellations

2007-05-21T17:10:00.000+01:00

Today’s entry is dedicated to the aggressive fiftysomething lady on the rush hour train out of London on Friday night, who grabbed my brother in law’s seat, stole my newspaper, then spent the duration of the journey eating an offensively strong egg sandwich and yelling down her phone at her poor son in his boarding school … whilst sitting in the ‘Quiet Coach’.

Mark my words, friends, the tyranny of the nearly-retired is upon us. Because they don’t work much, they have plenty of time to vote for the party that promises them a massive pension built from the sweat off our backs. We’ll be working until the age of 90 so that this last generation of state-sponsored layabouts can do the same at 60. And they eat egg sandwiches. Horrific.

Speaking of suspicious smells, did anyone else notice something strange about the BA price-fixing story last week? Notwithstanding BA’s name very deservedly being dragged through the mud yet again, we all seem to have forgotten that it requires two parties to tango around competition rules. Step forward Virgin Atlantic, who acted in an equally dastardly manner, but went to the Feds and shopped their old enemy. A new variant on the ole prisoner’s dilemma.

Wonder if Richard Branson is now living anonymously under witness protection? Somehow I doubt it.

Next time an aüslander bitches about black snot and London pollution in general, you’d do well to remind them that in terms of CO2 emissions, our fine city is in fact “dangerously like some hippie commune”. Perhaps Ken should do his bit about the wretched Low Emission Zone and put a sock in it for once.

Speaking of Transport for London, I would like to take the opportunity to declare a jihad against the City Hall muppet who came up with the idea of reducing the number of lanes by 50% on the Embankment just before Chelsea Bridge. This has had the admirable effect of turning a 30 second breeze into a 25 minute perpetual traffic jam. Always a pleasure when the chimplets are getting restless in the back of the sensible estate car.

Did you know that the English version of the Japanese ‘karoshi’ is ‘work-life balance’?

Of the four transactions currently tracking on my radar, two of them have a profusion of people with the same first names. Transaction A has four Tims, whereas Transaction B has three Anthonys. Not sure that this is significant. Or indeed interesting.

It's better to be wrong than alone

2007-05-18T15:46:00.000+01:00

Feeling as if my liver is going to explode today, mainly because of a four hour Menu Gourmand (roughly translates as 'bloated pig') dinner yesterday evening here, which involved six courses accompanied by six different glasses of wine, one of which was memorably called ‘Terre Arse’ (although sadly not pronounced in the correct English manner by our inevitably Polish waitron).

After a little awkwardness during a conversation with our German guest about whether wine from Alsace is German or French (it depends on who's asking, apparently), a fine evening was had by all. Wish I’d eaten less, though. Four courses would have been fine.

Here’s a story about City high flyers out-breeding each other. Makes my own two look rather meagre. If only they were joking about it being “cheaper to run a string of polo ponies than bring up twins.”

Be careful what you look for on Gumtree, however.

Good (ie. brief, and doesn’t contain any bloody ‘random musings’) blog about chatter on the tube. On reflection, this must be made up, as everyone knows that it’s simply not done to talk on the Tube.

Here’s a quick internet poll.

And finally, a Chartered Accountant dancing

See you next, um, Monday

She looks like a horse covered in rice pudding

2007-05-17T16:09:00.000+01:00

Grrr

Platinum standard in gender diversity benchmarking

2007-05-16T20:01:00.000+01:00

A period of deep gloom and bottomless dubitation

2007-05-16T16:57:00.000+01:00

An opening address from our soon-to-be-former premier ministre. For those of you who don’t speak French, Monsieur Blair is announcing that as a last ditch attempt to stop Gordon Brown from taking over, the UK is to be incorporated into the French state forthwith, and that speaking French with a terrible, terrible accent will be mandatory from 28 June. I’m sure at one point he says ‘France and England are the same height.’

Here's a good bit of small print, in case you were in any doubt about copying their advert and racing your car once you've bought M&S insurance:

Next time your train home’s delayed after a long day of run-rate analysis, why not simply let the red mist descend and run riot? Alternatively, you could buy a bottle of Diet Coke and a small bottle of rum at the station, mix them together as you run to catch the train, then drink the lot by the time the train leaves the station, as I saw one of my fellow straphangers do at Waterloo the other night.

Dull property related item – the UK government has fallen out with the entire property industry about something called a ‘Home Information Pack’, which becomes compulsory shortly (after the customary 10 minute public consultation period), despite the fact that they are demonstrably pointless. Despite the endless drivel spouted by government agencies about how great they are, HIPs will really only achieve 3 things:

It will make moving house £300 more expensive, without actually doing anything useful

It will result in the seller receiving a patronising report about spending £30,000 on better insulation in order to make savings of £50 per year on fuel bills, and

It will earn 6,000 freshly-minted, government-mandated (and therefore Labour-voting) Home Inspectors, £48,000 a year (or more than twice the UK average salary) for coming into your house and taking a cursory glance at your windows

For an excellent, surgical destruction of the pointless Yvette Cooper’s windy posturing, take a look at the profession’s view. But then what would the mere property professionals know, eh?

Our Paramount Leader Ken’s pointless posters are back, this time patronisingly telling us to walk for all journeys of 2km or less. Check out the hilarious transcript of the radio ad.

Strange how it doesn’t mention walking in dog turds and chewing gum, getting elbowed by joggers, yelled at by pavement cyclists, knocked down by Chelsea tractor drivers SMSing their nannies whilst shouting at their loathsome children, being intimidated by 12 year old children playing crap tinny rap music on their mobile phones, torrential rain (no umbrella, hole in shoe, all over splashing from heartless bus driver ploughing through a puddle), abused by drunks, hassled by petition wielders, charity direct debiters, Big Issue vendors and free paper distributors, oh, and the fact that on average, Londoners travel more than 10km to work each day, making the entire campaign a waste of time. Still, unsolicited advice from an organ of the state is always welcome.

Burning question of the day – are you a dispositionalist or a situationalist?

With more than 70 million competitors, here are five ways not to describe your blog if you ever want anyone to read it:
1. “General ramblings about stuff”
2. “Musings about my life”
3. “A series of rants about anything”
4. “Writing and stuff”
5. “Random thoughts, posted when I feel like it”

Finally, will you ever get rich? I am apparently heading (glacially slowly) towards ‘High Net Worth’. Apparently I’m missing the ‘X’ factor, though.

Enough random musings about my life and stuff. See you tomorrow.

Eurocorruption War Contest results

2007-05-15T23:16:00.000+01:00

If war is a continuation of politics by other means (cf. Von Clausewitz), what on earth is the warbling and prancing of the Eurovision Song Contest?

Notwithstanding Terry Wogan’s increasingly sarcastic (and perhaps inebriated) commentary about tactical voting, there may be something in it.

The map below separates the men from the boys, in terms of the pre-arranged trading of votes with one’s neighbours, based on the final scores on the doors, Is la.

Strange that Italy and Slovakia didn’t bother turning up this year, but good to see Israel hanging onto its European status though.

At the risk of equating a crappy song competition to regional geopolitics, the dividing line between dubious and scrupulous runs remarkably close to the course of the former Iron Curtain.

No less than sixteen countries happily exchanged the maximum (10 or 12) points with a direct neighbour.

Did these shenanigans in the Balkans make any difference to the result? In a word, yes, although I’m not really clever enough to work out why. For a start, Serbia’s winning margin was 33 points, way less than the 73 dubious neighbourly points it received. Also, four of the top five finishers are coloured a sinister red, whereas the highest ranked green nice guy came in at a poor 15th.

There’s probably a maths project about game theory in all this I should think.

In the manner of a hormone-laden teen disco, there’s a palpable sense of unrequited love in some areas, wherein one smitten nation gives maximum marks to a neighbour, and is rudely given the bird (‘nul points’ in Eurovisionspeak) in return. Here, then, is the list of likely future wars in Europe:

Bosnia and/or Serbia vs Croatia (rematch of previous local derbies in 1912, 1913, and of course the more recent decade-long affair)
Serbia vs Montenegro (residual bad feeling following the recent divorce?)
Russia and/or Latvia vs Estonia (the Russians are furious about a statue, and doing more than withholding votes at present; the Lats are p*ssed off that the Estonians consider themselves to be Scandinavians not Balts)
Armenia vs Turkey (just a little historical misunderstanding)
Ukraine vs Poland (no imminent return to the Duchy of Poland, it seems)

But then it’s only a bit of fun, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Embrace randomness and come to terms with black swans

2007-05-15T08:33:00.000+01:00

Got an email yesterday with the above title. Is there any any such thing as a black swan? Maybe that's the point.

So, back from a week in Greece and raring to go. Back to Greece, that is.

Today’s entry is brought to you courtesy of the Greek variety of the Hyundai Accent, a fine automobile that we had the pleasure of driving last week. Pity, though, that the doors were made from corrugated cardboard, and that it required two people’s grunting efforts to ram reverse gear into place. I guess that the Greek outpost of Europcar has been told that all English take pride in having terrible accents. Ah-ha.

Spent a happy week in a child-friendly holiday compound with a bunch of other London professionals who’ve waited until the brink of middle age to have children. It’s so unceasingly tiring to be a competitive middle class parent, what with proving one’s children’s running, throwing and swimming prowess, frantically singing nursery rhymes to them by way of making up for dumping them in the crèche for most of the day, and of course battle of the camcorders / digital cameras. The latter was a score draw – I counted four Canon EOSs and three Sony High Definition camcorders (including our own stolen one, of course).

Great to see that some clichés of the English abroad are timeless – the bar at the airport (which doubles up as a top secret military airfield and vegetable garden) was full of dozens of surly-looking middle-aged blokes angrily drinking litres of beer at 10am whilst waiting for their delayed flight back to Manchester.

It seems that most of the large accounting firms have been jumping around excitedly about their inclusion in a list of “Companies that count”, drawn up by the fine people at Business in the Community (a fine-sounding if ambiguous name – would drug dealing be classed as a community business?). I should blasted-well hope that accounting firms are companies that count – what the hell else would they spend their time doing?

Reminds me of a competition held at my school back in the ‘80s to devise a new motto. The winner was the memorable ‘Where everybody counts’, until someone helpfully pointed out that surprisingly few people could actually count. Deciding that ‘Where only a small minority counts’ didn’t quite hit the spot, the powers-that-be went for the much more ambiguous (and therefore more appealing) ‘Where everybody matters.’

It seems that Gordon Brown has started campaigning hard. The question is - for / against what? If he does absolutely nothing (or indeed slips away to Greece for a month), he'll still become Prime Minister without the bothersome task of asking the electorate about it, so why fly around the place making vapid speeches? So only a matter of weeks until Brown, Balls and Darling take over the country. My question is this - if the answer is 'Brown Balls, Darling' - what was the question?

2007-05-04T11:16:00.001+01:00

Here is the story of an incompetent Credit Suisse guy busted for insider trading. The dude used the office phone to tip off his contact FFS, no wonder he’s a ‘junior banker’ at the age of 37.

Nice to see CS claiming that they ‘immediately informed’ the authorities, when in fact CS hadn’t any idea what was going on, and had to be told by the SEC.

Still, secret squirrel info is part of the game. I sit here in the knowledge that the employer of someone I know well is up for sale, which may result in their losing their job. Should I tell them? No, because it’s illegal. Do I want to tell them? Yes. It’s all down to what my MBA ethics professor would call (with an absurdly overdone French accent) one’s ‘moral compass’.

Ever wish you were young again? Maybe in your middle teens, with the best (and most heavily subsidised) years of your life just around the corner? Think again – take a look into the mind of a 14 year old. I suppose one forgets the hormone-fuelled intensity of those difficult years…

Well, it’s Friday, so why not mix your self a double-oh drink sit back, and enjoy this quite brilliant piece of creative accounting.

I’m following the herd down to Greece for a few days, so hang in there, friends…

My ass is grass and he's got a lawn mower, you dig?

2007-05-03T14:12:00.000+01:00

Today’s supercharged entry is brought to you in association with Stephen Seagal’s Lightning Bolt, 'an energy drink as unique as the man who created it.'

If you thought Esperanto was a silly idea, why not try conversing in a new strange new Eurolanguage supported by this blog? I suggest that we cut the crap and start learning Manadarin.

Following yesterday’s global geography quiz, today’s is for those with the arrogant old-European view that US citizens passportless goons who ‘demonstrate a limited understanding of the world’ – step forward and prove your geographical superiority by naming each of the US’ very own states in 10 minutes. I petered out with 4 to go. Goddam Wisconsin.

New copy of The Idler is out, if you can be bothered.

And finally the story of a $65m pair of pants (or trousers, as we backwards Brits stubbornly insist on calling them). I love the idea that a judge is claiming ‘emotional damage’ of half a mil because his trousers went missing, plus another half mil to cover his own legal expenses. Plus 10 years’ rental car fees because he’s being ‘forced’ to drive to a different store. Send him to the tower, but don't for heaven's sake, lose his trousers.

Being born in a stable does not make one a horse

2007-05-02T17:00:00.000+01:00

A quick one today – I have proper work to do. So, using the punchy bullet-point style so loved of due diligence practitioners:

exchanged contracts on the new chimp enclosure in Tooting today, and if I could give you one piece of advice (or 'value add' as we call it), other than the obvious stuff about never trusting estate agents, it’s that you should never sell residential property to a junior investment bankers – it’s just not worth it.

one of junior chimp boy’s new words this week is ‘castle.’ Problem is, he can’t quite pronounce the ‘c’, leading a number of my fellow Earlsfieldians to believe they’re being called an ‘arsehole’ by a toddler who they’ve never met. The kid will go far. Heh.

Is it me, or is this an unpaid advert for a well known mobile operator, not an item of ‘media news’. ‘Golden spot’ my foot.

Say what you like about Gordon Brown’s support in the country, all of 182 people on Facebook like him. Only another 44,775,003 more of us to win over, and the job’s done. Might be easier to use the more, um, ‘reliable’ system of postal voting. I don't know why we bother to elect our new Prime Ministers at all. Hang on a minute...

For those Daily Telegraph readers out there feeling the urge to splutter in angry protest about something, why not ally yourself to the Campaign Against Political Correctness. The ‘about us’ page is particularly special - in the same way the devil has the best tunes, the lunatic fringe of the UK right has the ugliest nutters.

If you’ve got 10 minutes to spare and need some adrenalin to brighten up your day, why not try a high-pressure geography quiz? It's simple - you name each of the 192 member states of the UN whilst a socking great stopwatch counts down your ten minute allowance.

M’aidez, m’aidez

2007-05-01T12:33:00.000+01:00

Happy May Day, comrades, and long live the revolution. You can still join the brothers for an afternoon of marching and shouting in the May sunshine if you leave the office sharpish.

And it seems that marching and shouting are just about all the dudes at the PCS (Prop: M Serwotka Esq, controller the pen-pushers in various branches of the government machine) will be doing for a while, since they’ve arranged an unhelpfully titled day of ‘industrial action’, which should perhaps read ‘bureaucratic inaction’ on this very day.

I believe they’re striking because HMG is closing down the Job Centre Plusses (‘Job Centres Plus’?). Maybe they have a point – if the guys who help unemployed people have been made unemployed, who’s going to help them?

Here are some jobs the meaning and purpose of which escape me:

Visual merchandiser

Female hygiene operative

Minister of Excellence

Head of Proposition Development

Sharper eyed readers will note that the UK Sunday papers picked up on the Abercrombie and Bitch story featured in this very column ten days previously. The writ is in the post, gentlemen.

Out and about for some client drinks last night. The topics of conversation (in chronological order) are listed below:

Sufficiency of working capital headroom (it’s all down to judgement)

Impact on the year end audit of the requirement under IFRS to determine fact patterns (makes it much longer and more expensive)

Likely effect of the new Companies’ Act on directors’ responsibilities (nothing)

Whether South Africans who live in Putney are posher than South Africans who live in Earlsfield (probably, but there are fewer of them)

The minimum amount of outside space a rental flat full of South Africans needs to have a braai (about 0.4m2)

What roasted guinea pig (something of a signature dish in Ecuador, I gather) might taste like (bony chicken, probably)

Guessing how many Polish dudes there are in London (the assembled conversers came from all corners of London, and they all had a Polski Sklep in the neighbourhood)

Whether there’s a correlation between personal wealth and the waviness of one’s hair (yes - supported by empirical evidence from the high powered bankers standing at the other end of the room)

Can you guess the point at which the warm chardonnay kicked in?

And finally, next time you get lucky enough to see your London NHS GP and are told that ‘it’s probably a virus, I suggest you rest’, it’s time to get all pushy and North American on their complacent asses – here are three questions to ask them. I sense, however, that the responses will be a brusque (1) Nothing; (2) No; (3) Of course not, please leave immediately.

Enough already, I need to get ahead of the curve on my anchor tailored insights collateral deck. At least I think that’s what he said.

Labouring under an aberration of intellect

2007-04-30T12:46:00.000+01:00

Question: what do:

(a) Black Economic Empowerment
(b) Harry Enfield, and
(c) Razorlight

have in common? Simple. As a result of (a), millions of bronzed, athletic, hard-drinking South African gym-bunnies have made London their home. This has led veteran comic (b) to stick the boot in with ‘Pik’, a bone-headed Afrikaaner whose life revolves around boozing and vomiting.

So where does (c) fit in? Well, for some reasons, the gazillions of little ‘Piks’ (or something that sounds like it) who live down my way love nothing better on a summer’s afternoon than drinking 3 dozen Windhoeks and singing along in a sort of strangled drunken yell to ‘America’ by Razorlight. Three separate braais audible from my back garden have pulled this stunt in the last week.

So why is this? Do our SA friends perhaps feel some affinity with Johnny Borrell, frontman of Razorlight, who is linked in the public consciousness with having an elite education, a staggeringly high belief in his own abilities, and a propensity to drink too much? I couldn’t possibly comment.

Like it or not we live in interesting times

2007-04-27T12:24:00.000+01:00

Out and about last night (rare enough nowadays at a marginal cost of £8 per hour for babysitting), first to an art gallery (just a buncha pikchurs, innit) then to dinner with friends in Camden.

The dudes we had dinner with have one of these digital music thingies. Needless to say, and despite several patient and clear explanations, I can’t really remember what it is, or how it works. It’s very cool though.

Camden (no ‘Town’ – strictly for the tourists) might as well be on a different planet from little Johannesburg where I dwell. Whereas Planet Wandsworth is filled with Aryans trying to avoid black people, Planet NorfLandan is filled with white undergraduates trying to be black people.

I know it shouldn’t, but there’s something about white guys with dreads that winds me up. It’s all very well about ‘appreciating where you come from’, but most of these guys are from Kingston-Upon-Thames, for feck’s sake, not the other one in Jamaica.

Anyhoo, digital music guy recommended this site – a forum thing for hoody wearing soap dodgers who are old enough to know better, who spend their time breaking into old buildings and taking pictures. Once you get used to the mild whiff of nerdyness about the site, it’s strangely interesting.

Back to dull statistics – here is one of the dullest statistics-based sites I’ve seen for a while. Did you know that 900 trillion tonnes of solar energy has hit the earth this year? Um…no.

Certain of our US readers might want to consider this new model when next upgrading their cellphone / PDA / sidearm.

And finally, a quiz about Canada

Bon weekend à tous.

That's very much in the realms of technical positioning

2007-04-26T11:22:00.000+01:00

“Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg - it seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else”

Thanks to LBJ (who died on the day I was born) for that insight.

Today’s hot trickle of piss in the UK is on the subject of free banking. Unlike everywhere else on earth, Brits pay no charges for running a current account (or checking account, for our North American readers).

The banks, meanwhile, make piles of cash by screwing feckless borrowers with (admittedly outrageous) charges for writing them threatening letters that they didn’t want in the first place.

So the deal is: stay in credit, and your banking’s free; cross the line, and we’ll nail your fiscal arse to the wall.

Sounds good to me: the nation’s debt-ridden underclass is subsidising my free banking.

However, the generally rather well-off Guardianista classes are moaning like hell that it’s unfair. But nothing like as much as they’ll moan when their bank starts to charge them £20 a month in ‘service charges’ and £1 per cheque, cash withdrawal and card transaction. Then, my friends, then you’ll understand that regressive taxes on the unfortunate are a fine thing.

Quote of the week from The Apprentice:
"Hmm, so you're saying that this work is the story of the ocean and the life within?... Would you be happy if a fish restaurant bought it?"
Personally, I wouldn't hire any of them. But then I'm not an employer, so it doesn't matter.

Finally, why not build your own banner? (although I'm struggling to understand what half of them mean).

An opportunity to learn valuable lessons from a controlled failure

2007-04-25T14:04:00.000+01:00

Being the Wednesday of Administrative Professionals Week® (formerly Professional Secretaries Week®), today is officially Administrative Professionals Day® (formerly Professional Secretaries Day®). Here are some FAQs, but I'm not so sure that this lame bunch of questions are asked all that frequently.

As you may have guessed from the bunch of ®s, the phrase ‘Administrative Professionals Week’ has been hi-jacked by a gang of litigation addled Americans (the IAAP®, of course). However, if you should choose to use the more grammatically correct ‘Administrative Professionals’ Week’, you’re in the clear.

Another dull language gripe – everyone within earshot in the office is currently saying ‘irrevocable’ c.5x a day for some reason. So why the mascara’ed arse are they pronouncing it ‘irreVOCable’ not ‘irREVocable’?

Finally, here’s the strangest story of the day.

Now, where the hell is my bloody useless secretary...

I know a pissed horse when I see one. Get him a kebab.

2007-04-24T12:06:00.000+01:00

So dazvedanya Boris - the last of the great boozers in a position of power and influence, ignoring Charles Kennedy, of course. Feeling less than great today. Output restricted to a quote from Kingsley Amis:

"What I want is a chance to decide, from personal experience, that a life
of cocktail parties, cars, weekending at rich houses, wine, night-clubs and jazz
won't bring happiness. I want to prove that money isn't everything, to
learn that pleasure cloys."

With the exception of jazz, I agree.

Not so much a smile as a grimace of controlled revulsion

2007-04-23T12:04:00.000+01:00

Happy St George’s Day. Last I checked on Google News, the only media outlets making any reference to this were the Wimbledon Guardian, Blackpool Today (pretty similar to Blackpool yesterday, I should think), and the fabulous Suffolk Evening Star. I wonder how many junior hacks over the course of history have started the headline to their St George’s Day article with the words 'By George…'?

Call off the search - after many years of fruitless casting about, the definition of ‘holistic cross-platform solutions’ has finally been made clear. It’s a term employed by thieving swine to describe robbing the feckless poor via their tellys.

As I sat in Battersea Park over the weekend with junior chimps, chewing absentmindedly on a Mini Babybel Light (which somehow tastes of absolutely nothing at all, despite containing a generous portion of vegetable rennet, whatever the hell that is), I suddenly became aware that each of the 20 thirtysomething dads within a 200 metre radius of our tartan picnic rug was wearing identical blue Polo (with a big 'P') shirts and camel cargo shorts. So maybe there’s nothing new under the sun. I then returned to helping the junior chimps to wave a cheery ‘bye bye’ to every single aircraft flying overhead. We sat under the Heathrow flight path for 3 hours; there is a plane every 60 seconds – you do the math.

Dietary warning: a new nutritional menace is heading our way. Having never heard of it in my entire life until recently, I’ve crossed paths with something referred to as ‘the Bolivian super grain,’ or Quinoa, twice in the last week (once in a scandalously overpriced pot of plums, the other in a Tupperware pot full of baby sludge being emptied down a one year old’s reluctant throat). Mark my words, ‘the staple diet of the Incas’ is back in a big way. And we all know what happened to the Incas.

Would an Anglo-French aircraft carrier really be such a good idea? Given that it took the best part of four years to decide whether Concord(e) should be spelt with an ‘e’,, how long would it take to determine whether the speedometer (or whatever they have on boats) should read kilometres or miles, let alone whether planes should take off and land from the left-hand or right-hand lane?

Positive aggression is half the battle

2007-04-20T15:06:00.000+01:00

Having assumed that Reader’s Digest must have closed down years ago, I am proved wrong – apparently there are still enough readers out there to appreciate Memories of Immortal Jim Reeves, and How To Clean Just About Anything (“Did you know, for example, that deep heat rub can remove chewing gum from floors?”). I would previously have made a joke about Radio 2 listeners at this point, but unfortunately a plurality of my generation fall into this category nowadays, so it’s no longer funny.

These fine digesters of reading have also published a list of the best and worst places to bring up your children, which the idiotic winning yokels in East Dunbartonshire (I had to look it up on the map, too) are terribly excited about.

Now it may be that I am bitter that despite having an almost Third World (sorry, “Global South”) birth rate, and a dangerously high concentration of buggy workout and pilates practitioners (Mrs Chimp scores double points by combining the two, don't ask me how), my own fair Wandsworth comes in at a distinctly pedestrian 355th best out of 408, but is it maybe better to live in a somewhat “edgy” urban environment (Tooting, perhaps), than an suffocating middle class suburb where every middle manager reads the Reader’s Digest?

Has anyone else seen the ‘Free Alan Johnson’ hoardings that have been put up around London? It’s part of a campaign to “show support” and to exert pressure on “everyone with influence” over the unfortunate guy’s captors, which includes an online petition, and the ability to put a little Alan Johnson button on your blog.

Now, I totally share the concern and hopes expressed by the blog-buttoners, but my question is this: how on earth will this have any influence whatsoever on the hostage-takers? Will the guys crouched with their RPGs and Kalashnikovs in a Gaza basement by any chance be surfing through blogs in their idle moments and have a prick of conscience? And what of the assorted London couriers, cabbies, commuters on cycles riding past these billboards – what are they supposed to do? Or is this perhaps an example of well-meaning people adopting the doctrine that it is better to do something utterly pointless than to do nothing at all?

Better cheer up before sign off, so here’s a new game, called ‘ASBO name bingo’ (dedicated to one Carole Olva, who having cursed her daughter with the cast-iron ASBO name of “Serenza”, has recently been busted for goading her children to fight on video).

See how many names (girls or boys, it doesn’t matter which) you can spot which practically guarantee that its owner will at some point be slapped with an ASBO. My opening bets are Leah, Scarlett, Courtney, Dylan, Reece, and Jayden.

Finally, check out this piece of Jack Bauer-type technology. Big Brother just got bigger

You're 'avin' a graph mate

2007-04-19T23:01:00.000+01:00

Check it out - a graphical representation of this blog (yes, I've been drinking), thanks to the fine people at Websites as Graphs. Give it a go - your favourite website transformed into a slightly sinister, ever-growing cancerous cell-like structure thingy.

Can we do it on a slightly less VAT basis?

2007-04-19T14:25:00.000+01:00

Aggressive Tre is behind today’s title – you’ve got to respect him for suggesting a VAT fraud in front of Sralan’s slightly ludicrous in-house lawyer, who had to pretend to disapprove for the sake of the cameras. After all Sralan’s the original crafty cockney, or perhaps cockney, um, winker for our adult viewers.

Another day of having a less than bulging in-tray, so I’m looking for a suitable gift to send to pair of ex-bean counting colleagues to celebrate the recent arrival of their first born. I’m guessing that the people who claim to specialise in this area have limited experience of babies, since the sheer horror of milky sick, interrupted sleep, projectile diarrhoea, nine changes of clothes a day, soggy nappies, collapsing pushchairs, and the general collapse of civilisation which the arrival of a new baby entails can’t really be erased by a bottle of £15 bubble bath, a £24 box with a small dribble-proof book in it, a £40 box containing a couple of bibs and a single muslin square (average life expectancy in the line of fire – c.7 seconds), although “beautifully presented in cellophane”, or indeed a £200 baby rattle (with accompanying Tranquility:calming candle, which you’d Bloodywell:need at that price).

The problem is, a £30 Tesco voucher which could purchase all of the above plus a decent bottle of bubbly doesn’t really hit the mark.

Now that companies have finally stopped blaming 9/11 for crap sales, a new punch bag has obligingly been slung from the roof the corporate gym – apparently global warming is the reason why DVD rentals collapsed over Easter. That and the fact that Turner and Hooch is still filed under 'Latest releases'.

On that subject, I spent an extremely middle-aged 30 minutes last evening listening the Reith lecture by Jeffrey Sachs on Radio 4 (on Freeview, the only electronic device in Chimp Towers not currently farking broken). It was surprisingly pleasant to spend a few minutes doing nothing other than listen to the wireless – one could have been an Oxford tutor lying on a leather sofa, listening more or less attentively to an undergraduate’s weekly essay.

Anyhoo, the terrifying fact is that we’re apparently doomed, except we may not be. The good thing is that unlike the bloody moaning Indie (sorry to go about them, they just wind me up somehow), Sachs lays out a calm and balanced view of the situation, and offers hope that we’re going to be OK. The bloody moaning Indie, of course, wants us to stop work, destroy our houses, offer our children for human sacrifice, and live off dandelion roots in order to further the cause of ‘global justice’, whatever the hell that is. Take a look at this map to see whether you’ll be smug or swimming by the year 2050, when sea levels have risen by up to 14 metres. I’m about to move to a house on top of a hill. *smirks*

If you’re really, really bored, try this American IQ test thing, although, like me, you’ll have to get over the rage you’ll no doubt feel rising in your breast when you see the phrase “seven intelligences”.

And finally, if you’re really serious about getting shot of the muffin top before you hit the beach, try paying an ex-squaddie (probably with ‘issues’ after a tour in Iraq) to yell at you .

You must never trust a man who hunts south of the Thames, who has soup for lunch, or who waxes his moustache

2007-04-18T11:37:00.000+01:00

Good to see that following yesterday’s slip by Des Browne, firmly not saying sorry is now very much back on the political agenda. To quote our soon to be absolute ruler yesterday “I tell the House that I do not apologise.” That’s more like it.

Seething today due to an evening wasted weeping in frustration at my inability to cope with technology. In 30 short minutes, the following things ganged up on me:

wireless keyboard on PC packed up

no i-Link port (whatever that is) on my PC, rendering expensive stolen camcorder useless. Karma, man.

discovered that memory card in camcorder doesn't work because it has too much memory (double Karma, man), then

forgot internet bank password, then

forgot password for memory stick that contains spreadsheet with all my passwords, then

forgot password protecting the spreadsheet containing all my passwords, so

locked out on internet bank, then

replacement password sent to my BlackBerry didn't arrive, because Tooting doesn't appear to have a 3G network yet, then

poured a large G&T and tried to calm down

On the day after inflation busted 3%, and the humble British £ hit $2, a quick bitch. An Abercrombie & Bitch, in fact.

Before I gave up pretending that I was a young buck, I bought the odd item of yuppie (or more correctly, preppy) kit from A&F’s US website (they weren’t interested in the UK at the time). A t-shirt probably cost around $40, or maybe £25.

Now these goddam yanks are under-dressed and over here, having opened a store some place in the West End where the upper echelons (the sort one sees getting pissed at the Mariners in Rock after a hard day’s jet skiing whilst waiting for their GCSE results) drag their reluctant parents to spend a couple of hundred quid on some pre-wrinkled shirts.

The thing is, A&F have used Gap’s tactic of pricing their UK clothes by simply applying Tip-pex to the price label, changing our $40 US t-shirt into a £40 London t-shirt. Great news for A&F – assuming it cost $4 at the Vietnamese factory gate, the gross profit per shirt shoots up from an already-handsome $36 to a frankly drop-dead-gorgeous $76. Ker-ching.

Being too clever by half, I wondered whether this presented an arbitrage opportunity – why not buy the kit from the US website as before, and sell on at somewhere between the $40 cost in the US and $80 UK selling price?

However, by using internet trickery worthy of the Chinese government, the fiendish yanquis have in fact blocked access to the US website from the UK – no matter how you try it, the only way to access A&F online is on the UK website, which sells half the number of items for twice the price of its US cousin. Try it. Globalisation schmobalisation - this is protectionism, pur et dur.

However, the fact that:

the moaning bloody Indie seems to have added A&F hating to its already long list of bloody campaigns (running stories on 18 March, 22 March, 23 March (x2) and 25 March), and,

A&F winds up the swivel-eyed right-wing Christian lunatic fringe Stateside,

leads me to wish these price-gouging greedy seppos all the very best. Caveat preppy emptor.

A degree of regret that can be equated with an apology

2007-04-17T10:10:00.000+01:00

Today’s entry is dedicated to Des Browne, the soon-to-be-former Defence Secretary, who made history yesterday by being the first ever member of the current government to say ‘sorry:’

…eventually. Well done Des, it wasn’t as bad as all that, was it?

Apparently the poor guy has been compared by some unkind folk to Swiss Toni , a failed car salesman in The Fast Show (which I never really watched due to revision for accountancy exams). So, in tribute to the great man…

You know, completing a sensitivity analysis is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. You’ve got to acquaint yourself in detail with an eye-catching model. You must carefully identify her most sensitive parts. And manipulate them skilfully, to achieve an end result that satisfies all parties. Then you draw a bunch of graphs.

Some bright spark has come up with an irritating TLA (except it's technically an FLA) for the frequent problem of dipping one’s toe into the www ocean to look up some inflation statistics, only to emerge four hours later dripping with an encyclopaedic (if unplanned) knowledge of the art of llama breeding. Step forward: WWILFing.

Grammatical whinge of the day (1)
According to this article, a broadband challenge is facing Britain. Surely it’s Britain that’s facing a broadband challenge? How about ‘The clouds wandered lonely as me’, or perhaps ‘Fear has nothing to fear except ourselves’? Sounds a bit odd.

Grammatical whinge of the day (2)
Bloody annoying Jo from last year’s Apprentice (the screeching, irrational, crying one, although this was only because whilst selling fruit and designing calendars, she apparently “wanted to be true to myself, but found each day my conscience was challenged… you have to face your fears, deal with your demons and fight them off every day.”) seems to have launched a company with a grammatically tragic press release, in which she can’t in fact spell Sralan’s ever-popular catchphrase “You’re fired”. Or is it “Your fired?” Or is it “Your fir’ed?” Or is it “Yo’u’re f’i’red?”

I, think its’ a load of crap.

An awesome lack of anything interesting to impart

2007-04-16T15:21:00.000+01:00

Ah, dining al desko once again after a week in the highly unlikely Devon sun. I am in trouble with the powers that be for submitting timesheets late, spending more than 15% of my time on unauthorised administrative activities, failing to submit my CPD declaration and still not completing my SMART objectives for the coming year within the 12 box framework. What better reason to knock off for 10 minutes and blog awhile.

After weeks of paper shuffling, it seems that the purchase of the new chimp enclosure in Tooting may be going ahead. The question is – have we managed to get a bargain as house prices shoot up, or are we the last poor fools to close a deal at a ludicrously inflated price seconds before house prices begin to fall?

I think I’m the last person on earth to have heard about the guy skiing down the escalators at Angel, but it’s not a bad way of spending 1minute and 10 seconds of your afternoon.

I was unfortunate enough to go to a sixth birthday party on Saturday afternoon, which is unlike anything I’ve seen for a very very long time. Imagine the ninth circle of hell, and you’re not far off. The combination of a middle-aged fatso dressed as Scooby Doo (and running round clutching an inflatable Spiderman in what can only be described as a suggestive position) and a roomful of pumped-up six year olds was deeply disturbing.

Given the amount of time and effort that the government and educational establishment puts into moulding our future citizens into non-competitive soft-left tree huggers, the event was surprisingly Neanderthal, the key themes being:

Extremely loud throwaway pop music (including the unutterably awful ‘Fast Food Song’, which has surprisingly survived the post-Turkey Twizzler meltdown), which almost certainly fell within the definition of “excessive noise” under which an ASBO can be issued
Massively competitive dancing contests (the resulting jubilant winners and despondent losers running directly counter to the Department for Education and Skills’ requirement for “fairness and social justice.”
The contests also involved the cynical rigging of prize giving, wherein the juvenile judge of each contest gave the prize to their best friend, then shared the spoils, something the Competition Commission would be interested in.
Consumption of large quantities of unnaturally coloured sweets, something the Food Standards Agency would be particularly unhappy about – I particularly love the advice given to “avoid Shark, swordfish and marlin” – an everyday component of many British inner city toddlers’ diets
Lots and lots of shouting (see ASBO, above)

So once the combined might of bureaucrats belonging to the local magistrates, DfES, CC and FSA had shut the party down, what might a government-mandated alternative look like? My guess would be a Mozart piano recital presided over by a Community Support Officer, in which carrot batons and houmous are distributed equally (and above all quietly) between all of the subdued invitees. Thank heavens for political incorrectness.

Whilst the junior chimps were unsuccessfully pursuing a cockerel through the Devon farmyard last week, I took the opportunity to flick through the FT (not my own copy you understand, we were on hols with a proper businessman, not a parasitical hired-help such as myself), and found an article about business bloggers.

Today’s paradigm shifting question is: do I “write discreetly and bore readers witless”, or do I “reveal secrets and get fired”? Neither I hope, but you’re the judge of that (other than the firing bit, unless my boss is reading this).

Could anything on these endless dull pages aspire to be called “a rare flash of talent in the over-hyped and overcrowded field of blogging”? or is it truer to say that I have “an awesome lack of anything interesting to impart”?

Who cares. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Triangulating your resilience is like watching a swan.

2007-04-05T13:22:00.000+01:00

Today's post (which is in a holiday mood) is proudly dedicated to the Baron, who after this afternoon is giving up exciting opportunities in a go-getting organisation in order to muck about with covenant re-sets for the rest of his career.

This week's lesson from Sralan on 'The Apprentice': "When I sell, I sell to people like Dixons". Maybe if they hadn't carried so much Amstrad stock, Dixons 106 closed stores might still be open.

Well, a very Happy Easter to you all, I'm out of town for a while. And remember - in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It’s probably true that hard work never killed anyone – but why take the chance?

2007-04-04T10:07:00.000+01:00

Thanks to the late Gipper for today's title. Just goes to prove that you be a slacker and still make it to the top, provided that you're sufficiently charming.

Have you ever been trying to read a particularly complex paragraph in a book (this sort of thing) whilst on the train home when a series of unsolicited announcements (‘There is no smoking on this train …please do not leave bags unattended…please move right down inside the carriages…please do not give money to beggars’ etc) means that you have to re-read it 12 times for the meaning to go in?

Well, HMG’s latest idea is to distract your attention permanently from your own little life by deeming it necessary to have local council employees barking orders at us through loudspeakers
in addition to watching our every move on CCTV.

Better still, the government has come up with the idea of using local children to be ‘the voice of authority,’ in an effort to tug on the heartstrings of the minor offenders being harangued as they mind their own business urinating on bank machines and throwing litter bins at each other after a night drinking Thunderbird.

Can you imagine the trauma, as a hormonal 14 year old chav, of hearing an eight year old’s voice crackling ‘Please refrain from having unprotected intercourse on the park bench behind the running track’ over a nearby loudspeaker just as you enter the home straight with your girlfriend?

The UK, it seems, is turning into a vast, authoritarian primary school.

And finally, having spent yesterday afternoon on yet another training course discussing at length something called ‘permitted leakage’ in the context of locked box transactions, a couple of Trevor McDonald-style ‘light’ items to leave you with a warm feeling as you get on with your day:

There seems to be a childrens’ film doing the rounds, incredibly called ‘The Last Mimzy’. Setting aside the Americanization (with a 'zee') of the spelling, this film suggests all sorts of inappropriate imagery to the adult viewer;

‘Menopause: the Musical’ (I sh*t you not) . Coming soon to a theatre near you: ‘Erectile dysfunction: the pop-up (but only after therapy) book'

If you are sad, you can pick a fantastic wine, drink it without saying a word and afterwards still not say a word and just make love

2007-04-02T10:11:00.000+01:00

This morning’s blog title is courtesy of Gerard Depardieu, the celebrated French baquet de saindoux (‘tub of lard’ to you mon ami), perhaps best known for his portrayal of a 23 stone, um, ‘starving’ miner in the tedious early ‘90s French film ‘Germinal’, which I was lucky enough to sit through in a drafty Parisian cinema in the early 90s when I should have been doing my translation homework.

I found myself in the Lyceum Theatre on Saturday afternoon, blocking the view of the unfortunate 4 year olds sitting immediately behind me, watching ‘The Lion King’. I’ve decided that chartered accountancy will never make me rich, and will henceforth establish my fortune by flogging small branded soft toys (knocked out in Vietnamese sweatshops for 4p a throw) to yuppie children for £15. As for the show itself, there was one particular song about a depressive egomaniac whose ruthless power grab still didn't make him popular, which resonated somehow…

Scene XI - The madness of King Gordon
Enter King Gordon, crowned after an ‘accident’ disposed of Kallmitoni, his popular predecessor, prowling up and down his lonely cave, with Edballs, his hyena-in-chief

King Gordon: Edballs, why am I not loved? I am that rare and awesome thing, I'm every inch a king. Yet I feel a twinge of doubt, as I go walk about. When my name is whispered through the pride, is this talk of love or regicide? Tell me I'm adored, please tell me I'm adored. Day after day it gnaws at the very core of my being, it's like an itch... deep, persistent, profound...

Edballs: You are so adored, oh, you are so adored

KG: That's more like it

EB: Oh, how I miss Kallmitoni

KG: Kallmitoni?! Kallmitoni?! How dare you! I told you never to mention that name!

EB: Note taken. I shall never mention "K-k-k" again

KG: Even in death, his shadow looms over me, there he is! no! there he is! and there!

EB: Calm yourself, Sire, or you'll get another one of your splitting headaches!

KG: I am perfectly fine! I'm better than Kallmitoni was, I'm revered, I am reviled, I'm idolized, I am despised, I'm keeping calm, I'm going wild! I tell myself I'm fine.

EB: Oh, pull yourself together, Sire!

KG: Oh, very well. Edballs? Edballs, Edballs, Edballs...?

EB: Yes, Sire?

KG: Nobody loved me, there's the rub, not even as a cub. What did my brother have that I don't have?

EB: Do you want the short list or the long?

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

2007-03-30T12:17:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-28T20:07:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-27T14:06:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-03-26T14:50:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-22T15:22:00.000Z

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

2007-03-21T11:43:00.000Z

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

Benign debt paydown profile

2007-03-20T09:27:00.000Z

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

2007-03-19T12:06:00.000Z

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

2007-03-14T01:33:00.000Z

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

2007-03-13T03:41:00.000Z

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

2007-03-09T14:27:00.000Z

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

2007-03-08T08:44:00.000Z

Sleepwalking into mediocrity

2007-03-07T09:51:00.000Z

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

2007-03-06T13:49:00.000Z

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

2007-03-02T13:10:00.000Z

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

2007-03-01T02:25:00.000Z

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...

Some sort of bridge pun, but can't think of one

2007-02-28T12:57:00.000Z

I'm lurking in a Secret Squirrel (NB 1970s cartoon reference again) Project Room on the floor of my office where our IT Support team is based. My previous contact with these people has been limited to getting an answerphone message at 5.20pm telling me they've all gone home, and the sad news that they only support one type of home wireless router. Which I don't have. Because I bought it in 2004. Three years before I'd even heard of my current employer.

Anyways, here is a list of the top ten activities on this floor of the building:

1. Arriving at work at 10am

2. Switching on the five wide screen flat screen monitors on one's desk

3. Stopping for a coffee break with the paper

4. Doing some random Google searches (on 42" monitor screen)

5. Updating fantasy football team (")

6. Reading every article on BBC News (")

7. Stopping for a coffee break with the paper

8. Putting the answerphone on

9. Going home shortly after 4

10. Um...that's it.

A sort of metaphor for value alienation and identity confusion

2007-02-28T01:37:00.000Z

Another day, another semi-Lionel - four in less than a week. My junior assistant is now really taking the piss about how old I am, and how he can barely remember the 80s.
Plenty of TUDA* for him tomorrow. You may be young, my friend, but I have the power to command you to do some spurious pie-charting of 'Other expenses' all the way back to 1H03.
Time for to trek back to the wilds of South London now.
Hope you're all asleep.

* Totally Useless Data Analysis

In the pink

2007-02-27T15:15:00.000Z

Ever seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? I only ask because the junior Excel chimp currently assigned to receive muddled and infrequent orders from me had never heard of Hong Kong Phooey when I mentioned him (don’t ask) earlier, thereby undermining my entire cultural frame of reference (inasmuch as it’s possible to undermine a frame).

I digress.

You may recall that our heroes borrow Cameron’s uptight dad’s low mileage Ferrari, and leave it with a couple of lusty rogues at a valet parking lot, after which said rogues clock up 306.35 miles (don’t believe me? Check the script) on the Ferrari.

Well, it seems a bunch of clowns called Pink Meet and Greet have been pulling the same trick at London Gatwick Airport. The question is, would you do business with a firm that has “SEIZED TRADING” and will advise once “ADVICE HAS BEEN SEEKED”?

Luckily they “Excepts all major Debit/Credit card”, after which “you will recive confirmation” Wow.

“How comes Pink are so cheap?” you ask? Well, it’s because they keep their “over heads” (ceilings? umbrellas?) low.

There are some warning signs, however – the “phone lines are now back up and running” – what happened to them? Presumably they’re on Orange. The “lady in the office will gladly take your number regarding complaints” – oh dear. Watch out though, since “you may not always get a responce”

And people paid money to this outfit? Whatever happened to caveat emptor ?

Isn't there an 'o' in 'country'?

2007-02-27T02:52:00.001Z

Just finished work for the day - my iPod served up the Nik Kershaw classic 'I won't let the sun go down on me' (his only classic in fact - 'The Riddle' was utter crap), which led me to vow there and then not to let the sun come up on me, and shut down Excel. The iPod is clearly on an 80s trip - 'Papa Don't Preach' was never particularly good, and hasn't improved with age, but I need both hands to type.
'Night all

What's in a name?

2007-02-26T09:57:00.000Z

Blog silence for a few days - I'm clinging to the icy black run that is an imminent reporting deadline. May still plunge into a crevasse.

I read this morning that one of the descendants of the injuns who battled Custer at Little Bighorn is named 'Ron Whose Horse Is Like Thunder' - not merely a name, more a character sketch. So, readers, what would your Native American name be?

Sincerely

Chimp Whose Mortgage Is Like A Mighty Earthquake And Whose Hair Is Like The Receding Tide

Casting about for a semantic escape hatch

2007-02-20T11:24:00.000Z

Overheard on the bus this morning:

Tooting undergraduate 1: When I graduate I'm gonna become a social worker, innit

Tooting undergraduate 2: Why iz dat?

TU1: Coz you get da key worker housing off da government innit

TU2: Woz dat?

TU1: Iz loads of free cash. You buy a house well cheap, sell it an make a fortune man

TU2: Then you moov to Chelsea, innit

TU1: Yeah, man.

That'll be where my 25 grand stamp duty will be going then. Key workers my arse.

Another week...

2007-02-19T16:04:00.000Z

...another opportunity to (use) excel. On a lengthy conference call back in the regions - GNER redeemed themselves by managing to run a train today - well done gentlemen. Today I've learned that my current handler, when stressed (a frequent occurrence by all accounts), strides up and down the room shouting into his mobile whilst breaking wind uncontrollably. Better out than in, I suppose.

A bottle of crap wine with a picture of Hitler on it has apparently sold for four grand - maybe Fuhrerwein is a new way for Tony Blair to make ends meet when he finally leaves office. Personally, I'd prefer a glass of Margaret Thatcher Armagnac any day.

Regional rage

2007-02-17T21:51:00.000Z

Back in London, thank the almighty, but not without regional problems - having spent five hours taking me back to the North on Thursday (instead of the advertised two), GNER yesterday decided to stop providing trains at all, forcing me to crouch* for an hour in a regional corridor in a very crowded regional train to regional Sheffield, after which I crossed a windswept regional station platform to board a trans-regional train South, on which I stood for a further two and a half hours listening to regional people having regional conversations on their regional mobile phones.
Maybe I should jack it all in, grow a regional moustache, put a regional pen in my regional breast pocket, and get with the regional lifestyle. Whatcha reckon?

*due to widespread malnutrition in the regions, people are shorter, resulting in trains with very low ceilings

The Queen's Delivery Entrance

2007-02-16T08:19:00.000Z

Walked past the 'Queen's Delivery Entrance' sign this morning (which will allow the regional readers out there to identify where I am) - surely this is a private matter between her and Prince Philip rather than the subject matter for a public sign. That's the problem with modern society - no respect for authority.

Yes, in the regions, overlooking Satan's Inner Ring Road from my retro office. It took nearly 5 hours to get here yesterday due to something darkly referred to as 'a fatality in the Retford area'. Whereas I can fully understand the business case for the transaction (I've never actually stopped in Lincolnshire, but I've seen enough of it), the timing and execution weren't great. Have a good Friday.

A typically murky exploration of meaning and meaninglessness

2007-02-15T10:47:00.000Z

Made it back to the metropolis for a few brief hours - gratefully breathing in lungfuls of sulphur dioxide from stupid bendy buses. Good to see that Coldplay's record label is swimming in nine kinds of cr*p at the moment - wonder if Chris Martin has updated his opinion about shareholders now that his own livelihood is looking a little shaky?

Back to the regions this evening...

Excel chimp's regional adventure

2007-02-14T09:19:00.000Z

I was going to regale you with amusing mobile phone photos of my regional hotel (pointy loo paper, beige shower curtain, creaky ironing board, Corby trouser press, Gideons bible, room service menu, laminated advert for porn next to the ancient TV - you know the score), but unfortunately my employers neither understand nor approve of Bluetooth, nor will they let me load the right drivers on my laptop, so the photos are stuck on my phone for time being.

If you want to come round and see them, I'm in meeting room 7 of a regional office, which overlooks the ring road through both its tiny windows, is fully furbished with 1974 executive furniture, and swings wildly between boiling and freezing due to the ongoing battle between the massive radiator (which we can't switch off properly) and the air con unit (which we can't switch on properly).

I leave you with the initial samples of the Excel Chimp leisurewear range, coming soon to a data room near you. Please sign out before you leave. Regional coffee anyone?

Reliance restricted

2007-02-12T23:22:00.000Z

Friends, I've been posted to a regional office for a while , and I've no idea whether the internet has made it up there yet, so there may be an extended period of account until the books are next closed.

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth

2007-02-12T10:10:00.000Z

Millennium?

2007-02-09T14:34:00.000Z

Good to see that the Google ad server algorithm is working - track chimpanzees in the bush whilst controlling financial risk and governance issues. Heading for 1000 hits today, with any luck...

Life is like a sewer...

2007-02-09T11:34:00.000Z

... what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

London has got through its second bout of snow in as many weeks. I wonder if you can draw lessons about a nation's psyche from the way in which it responds to adversity (and yes, 1/2cm of snow represents severe adversity for us)? Based on limited data, the primary response amongst my fellow Londoners has been...to wear unusual shoes. My office colleagues were yesterday wearing a motley collection of golfing shoes, trainers, boots, and what seemed to be a pair of bowling shoes. Very rum.

Have good weekend y'all.

Hu Jin, we have a problem

2007-02-07T21:27:00.000Z

I read somewhere that China blames the West for global warming. Fair enough. The problem is that their defence was backed up with some 'per capita' data - highly dubious to say the least, given that there are 1,313,973,713, um, capita lurking there (according to the CIA, anyway). Imagine two towns, one with a population of 10, one with a population of 100. The first town has 1 murder in a year, the second has 8 murders. The second is safer on a per capita basis, despite having 8 times the number of murders. I digress. To its shame, the West (whoever that is) responded with even more slippery data, referring to the 'average increase' in something or other. Mark my words, the Chinese will be bringing in 'normalisation' before long...

Due diligence accountant...sh*t, still only a due diligence accountant

2007-02-05T22:05:00.000Z

Some of you may be aware of the chimp's parallel project, http://www.boilingtheocean.com/, a collection of corporate bullsh*t jargon. Anyhoo, I had the pleasure this afternoon of attending a meeting in which a gang of senior private equity dudes faced off with a gaggle of young, thrusting M&A guys - always a volatile combination. The result was a stream of banal nonsense unheard of since the glory years of the dotcom boom at the turn of the century. In just one hour, the air was darkened by the following travesties (provided with handy translation back into English):

"this is not the ditch I want to die in" (I don't want to work on this project)
"this looks like [Name of Private Equity Firm]'s Gallipoli" (I'm not convinced that this project is entirely a good idea)
"let's prod it hard" (let's read some spreadsheets)
"it's not impossible that you're being spoofed" (someone as unscrupulous as I may be lying to us)
"they've created a herd coming along the track" (ditto)
"we need to build an angle without taking a sucker punch" (I have no idea what to do next)
"can we roll you through our scope?" (may I read this document to you?)
"of course, we'll do whatever it takes to get it over the line" (We will lie, cheat and murder to get our fees out of you)
"we have two choices -bullsh*t or attack" (I have no idea what to do next)
"we've gotta build our own bricks, here" (we may have to do some work)

Two other observations: (1) one of the private equity dude's watch was inexplicably 55 minutes slow. Why on earth would that be? Offshore financial centre mean time? (2) The M&A guy prefaced practically everything he said with "If I were cynical...", which in fact means "What I've done on every other deal I've ever worked on...". Tsk, they're estate agents in bigger offices.

Finally - the idiotic Nigel Farage who runs the UKIP has been photographed in front of the Palace of Westminster (I forget why), achieving the magnificient accolade of looking exactly like Stephen Fry in a sketch from c.1994. Which one is which? Good work Nige - back to the future....

So, who have we got in the burrito?

2007-02-05T09:30:00.000Z

The Economist this week referred to the City's stock of 'due diligence accountants' being 'second to none'. The Economist clearly hasn't much first hand experience of the City's stock of due diligence accountants. Nevertheless, Excel Chimp salutes The Economist.

Culture of blame

2007-02-02T09:46:00.000Z

It's five years to the day (I'm not anally retentive, I just remembered 02/02/02) since we moved into our current, and soon-to-be-ex-with-a-bit-of-luck-an-understanding-mortgage-lender-and-favourable-macroeconomic-conditions house. According to the estate agent who valued the gaff (a shack in Tooting, you recall) yesterday morning, it has appreciated in value by £152 / day each and every day that we have lived there. I, on the other hand, work 18 hour days for round about the same amount.
If a truck backed into our street and dropped off £16m in used fivers, we'd sit up and take notice. Strange thing is, that's more or less the 'value add' to the 57 dwellings in my street (yes, yes, very anally retentive) that has quietly occurred since 020202, and no-one's really noticed.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the nights of our lives

2007-02-01T00:30:00.000Z

Anti-social hours starting again - the chimp may be absent for a spell...

Can't handel it any more

2007-01-31T08:26:00.000Z

Exceptional item

2007-01-30T14:21:00.000Z

A clear winner in the Accountants-in-films competition.

For the avoidance of doubt...

2007-01-30T08:19:00.000Z

...all of the bad press that estate agents suffer is wholly unmerited in my opinion. By way of context, the excel chimp enclosure in Tooting is rapidly becoming too small for our needs, resulting in the tentative decision to leverage up to dangerous levels in order to get a larger house. As a result, my wife spent yesterday afternoon in the company of various estate agents, who despite their dubious reputation, definitely DID NOT do any of the following:

suggest in no uncertain terms that our budget was nowhere near big enough, and hint that we'd need to spend at least £50k more than our budget
quietly suggesting that frankly we didn't have enough money, and weren't the sort of people that they wanted to associate with
imply that we would not be taken remotely seriously until we'd seen their 'independent financial adviser'
on being challenged about the above, insisting that the financial adviser really was independent
on being presented with irrefutable proof that they were fibbing, reluctantly admitting that said financial adviser wasn't perhaps independent in the normal sense of the word
hint that unless we use them both to buy and to sell, we wouldn't have a hope
offer to get the valuation done immediately, sign us up to the contract within an hour, and have the house on the market before tea time

God bless them, every one.

Following an earlier post, the above is an exciting montage of further accountants in films, and what a fine bunch of excel chimps they are. Downtrodden, grey, bespectacled to a man. On the left is the nerdy guy who brings down the Capone mob due to non-compliance with tax regulations in 'The Untouchables'. Centre is the fellow from 'The Producers'. Right is Mr Stern from 'Schindler's List'. Any more out there?

Gone

2007-01-29T07:19:00.000Z

You could post a letter through that mouth

2007-01-26T22:08:00.000Z

The above quote about Cherie Blair, by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh.
Click on the thingummy to make it big and legible

Unlucky people are generally more tense

2007-01-26T06:50:00.000Z

Well, it's Friday again. And in a spirit of merriment and joy, why not take a look at the 'Loser's Guide to Being Lucky'

Respect zones

2007-01-25T15:02:00.000Z

In a frankly unsurprising development, the government has created 40 'Respect Zones', being those places where no-one respects anyone. Using the same rationale, HM Treasury is to be renamed as a 'Charismatic Efficiency Zone'. Ho ho.

Is it me or is the new US anti-terror weapon made from a old kitchen floor attached sideways to a hummer? People would pay good money to feel 'like they're about to catch fire' without being in danger. Pity to waste such a good idea on Iraqi militias.

"My God man! I'm not a strawberry!"

2007-01-24T17:30:00.000Z

Thanks to the late Edward VII for the title of today's blog (brought to you in association with Shh...by Jade Goody. Excellent advice, Jade), who spluttered the above to a footman who spilt cream on him.

Just about the only thing I can remember...

2007-01-23T22:02:00.000Z

... from my all-day risk management seminar today is the phrase:
"We need to pick the right horse and make sure it's fully staffed".
Discuss.

Monday gloom

2007-01-22T10:09:00.000Z

Girly swot analysis

2007-01-19T08:39:00.000Z

I always had my suspicions about our great president, but look at this - a file prepared in minute detail for a Q&A session, with dozens of little post-it notes (in two colours - yellow for the top of the file; white for the side) glued in so that he doesn't lose his place. Parliamentary life is far too dangerous to risk spontaneous wit.

This gives the lie to TB's carefully propogated 'back story' of being a rock'n'roller at Oxford back in the '70s - he was in fact in the library with six different coloured highlighters, marking up his meticulously-taken lecture notes whilst frowning at people talking.

So...

2007-01-18T21:48:00.000Z

...whilst nuclear war with India draws ever closer thanks to Jade Goodey, UK inflation spins out of control, Iraq descends further into chaos, the Taleban stages yet another comeback in Afghanistan, and the poor ickle polar bears have to swim for it as the polar ice caps melt ...

Maggots

2007-01-17T19:49:00.000Z

MBA Business Strategy and Ethics 101
Case study

Read the following case, and answer the questions which follow (50 minutes)

Mr X
Mr X walks into a department store, chooses a camcorder, pays for it and leaves the store 15 minutes after arriving, a happy man, fully equipped to stalk his ankle-biters with said camcorder for the remainder of their short childhood.

Mr B
Mr B walks into department store, hangs silently around the customer service desk in that very English way (you know the one - desperately trying to convey annoyance at poor service, without actually saying or doing anything), being roundly ignored by the sales staff, who are stapling bits of paper to other bits of paper. Ten minutes later, when it becomes clear that Mr B is not going to go away anytime soon, a member of staff finally acknowledges his presence and provides assistance in choosing a camcorder. Mr B selects a camcorder, and in a controversial move, suggests buying it then and there. The staff are flabbergasted - does this fool really think we actually stock these things?

Mr B reluctantly gives the sales guy a lot of personal information, which is typed very slowly into an ancient computer, whose printer eventually spits out a piece of paper, which is stapled to another piece of paper, and handed back to Mr B, with the promise that the camcorder will be in stock within two weeks.

Three weeks pass.

Mr B receives a voicemail that the camcorder is ready for collection. Mr B returns to the department store, and finds himself once again facing a pair of under-employed sales assistants - one is adjusting his tie and staring at a hole in the ceiling, the other is ... stapling a piece of paper to another piece of paper. Mr B attracts the sullen attention of one of these coves and relays his intelligence regarding the camcorder, only to be told by the sales guy, with a mixture of relief and joy, that he can't possibly help, and that Mr B is required to join a very long queue for something obliquely referred to as 'Customer Assistance'.

Ten minutes pass, during which time the two members of staff serving customers (there are four more lurking in the background, apparently checking the work of the other two) manage to serve one customer each, which of course involves stapling a lot of pieces of paper to other pieces of paper.

A further five minutes pass, at which time Mr B is finally at the front of the queue. Two minutes after that he is served, and pays the princely sum of £399 for the camcorder (do you remember the camcorder? He'd ordered it the previous year.) It then transpired that 'Customer Assistance' did not actually have the camcorder - an entirely seperate team of paper-staplers called 'Customer Collections' was the only one actually permitted to get their hands on the things that customers actually visit the store in order to buy.

A short elevator ride later, Mr B emerges in the 'Customer Collections' area, a strange mixture of an old-fashioned Post Office and rather bad tempered branch of Argos. Due to a minor miracle, there is no queue. Mr B is served by an angry looking man called Nigel who disappears behind a screen for a spell before eventually returning with...the camcorder. Nigel staples some pieces of paper to some other pieces of paper.

Mr B brings the camcorder home, some 3 weeks later than planned. Mr B opens the box. Mr B frowns slightly, since the camcorder doesn't look like the one he chose all those weeks ago. Mr B checks on the department store's website, and discovers that he's in fact been given a top of the range product by the hapless Nigel, worth some £300 more than he paid for it.

Questions

1. Discuss the merits of the business model used by the department store under the two scenarios. Provide evidence to back up your conclusions (15 marks)

2. How on earth is the department store under scenario B still in business? (25 marks)

3. Given the crass incompetence, stupidity and rudeness of everyone associated with the department store, should Mr B return the camcorder to the store? (Note that the camcorder that he originally ordered is still out of stock, according to the store's website) (10 marks)

Previously on 24...

2007-01-17T08:36:00.000Z

Statistics

2007-01-16T20:00:00.000Z

Strange

2007-01-16T09:50:00.000Z

Taxing accounting

2007-01-14T22:28:00.000Z

So I've just submitted my 2005/06 tax return, and am delighted to have contributed more than £20,000 to Uncle Gordon's coffers during the period. At the current rate of £1.5bn a year, that's bought me 7 minutes of 'peacekeeping' in Iraq.
The above snap is meant to be the first of a series of 'famous accountants in films'. Trouble is, there aren't many more of them. Oh well.
Monday starts in less than 90 minutes. I've already received an SMS from El Presidente telling me to get into work early tomorrow. Have a good week, bean counters.