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

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

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

A sort of metaphor for value alienation and identity confusion

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

Casting about for a semantic escape hatch

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...

...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

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

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

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

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

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

Millennium?

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...

... 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

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

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?

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

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

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

Can't handel it any more

Exceptional item

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

For the avoidance of doubt...

...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?