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?

Gone

You could post a letter through that mouth

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

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

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!"

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...

... 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

Girly swot analysis

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...

...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

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)