Roger Gambba-Jones

As a numbers phobic, with a special disdain for bean counters (accountants and anybody who thinks that numbers are more important than people) I've been taking a somewhat fiendish pleasure in the stories about the billy wizzes of the banking and financial world being outed by the virtual collapse of capitalism and the free market.

I say outed, because this crisis has exposed them as being no more clever at counting than the rest of us - perhaps we can now stop treating all these numerate clever dicks like they were gods and the rest of us are morons that are incapable of putting two and two togeather!

As an illiterate of the numerate kind, I've always had to sit and listen to the bean counters waxing lyrical over the various spreadsheets waved under my nose as evidence of their case for cutting this or that, or as proof that the statistics mean they're right and I'm wrong! 

How many new initiatives have been introduced in recent years, based on the statistics produced by these ‘experts', but have then lead to a disastrous fall in standards? 

Bobbies on the beat, school dinners, matrons on our hospital wards, teaching kids to spell - to name but a few!

However, I've always suspected that what they were saying was actually no more than gobbledigook and they were just blinding us with their particular version of mumbojumbo science - how else would they have been able to make such a cock up of so many things and get away with it for so long?

Unfortunately, many of these bean counters will have made sure that they've made suitable arrangments, or exit stratergies to use their jargon.  So as usual, the only ones that are going to be suffering long term from all of this chaos are the little people like you and me - as per the title, ‘their chickens our roost'.  

So, when all the dust has settled and it looks like the world might be back on an even keel of sorts, don't ever believe everything the surviving bean counters are telling you again!