Yesterday was the day that gets all accountants damp in the crotch, a-quiver with excitment, the day on which they feel a sense of great importance in the lives of oridnary people, a day that was designed just for them...The Chancellors budget announcement.
To the rest of us it was the usual pile of excrement that dominated news headlines for a few hours but which will be quickly forgotten today.
The BBC even offer to calculate just how much better off you are after Gordon Brown made his pronouncements in parliament yesterday, its right here, and it tells me that I will be £306.25 bettr off this year than last - well whoppee-do, thank you Gordon, I'm not sure how I'll spend the extra £5.89 a week but I'm sure the three vultures who inhabit my house will find a new and exciting way to do so.
I can't even bring myself to list any of Gordons wonderful new tax breaks, incentives and penalties because to be perfectly honest I don't know what they are and can't summon up any enthusiasm to go find out - but I know a breed of people who will know every last comma and full stop of his speech - the accountants.
I don't know whether they still do it but I once went to an accountants budget day presentation, accountants all over the country apparently used to (may even still do) gather their clients in their offices for wine and cheese and summarise what all of the budget proposals will mean to them, their businesses and their families and there was/is huge competition amongst the accounting profession to get their presentation in first, some even doing it live while the Chancellor is still speaking.
Thats as exciting as accounting gets.
Just the one day a year then.
I remember attending my budget day presentation and walking from the building full of free wine and cheese, feeling slightly billious and wondering what I'd been doing for these last few hours of my life - I had been bored beyond stupification and brain cells that normally stored short term memory stuff had started to delete themselves for want of something better to do in a sort of "hey if your not going to use us then we're out of here buddy".
All of the accountants that I have ever had the misfortune to meet have been cut from the same cloth - the dull cloth that no-one else wanted, the brown cloth that went out of fashion twelve years ago and has been gathering dust on the shelf or used as pet bedding ever since - accountants are universally almost transparent in nature, you talk to them and then three minutes later have no memory of who or what you have been talking to, they are the least impressive people on the planet to the extent where they have a negative impression, meet and forget, shake hands and move on to the next person, nothing to see here, move along please.
My own accountant is a nice enough bloke but he cannot find a topic of conversation to engage on that does not involve accountancy, try and change the subject and you'll confuse him and when he repies it will be an accountancy centric reply, something like "Hello my accountant, do you know that I'm building a large pond in my back garden this weekend ?", "oh really, how much will it cost, do you know that you can get tax relief on building blocks and that VAT on fish is zero, of course if it increases the value of your house then capital gains tax will apply if you die and leave it to someone who is not in your family so I'd recommend that you gift the pond in trust to your neighbour then lease it back for a peppercorn rent over fifty years and - ooooof"
The last bit is where you punch him in the face and leave his office, bored again.
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