When £10 costs 9 pence.
The Countess is trying to persuade me that the cost of a main Soviet battle tank, The T-72, is a bargain for the school run. The nub of her argument seems to be that £10 costs only nine pence. This is an argument I would dearly like her to win with the increasingly insolent tax man and bank manager: even the Count would countenance given them nine pence out of every £10 they demand.
To back her case up, the Countess produced her credit card statement. It took several shots of vodka to recover from the numbers in the botom right hand corner of the statement. To add insult to injury, the card company was inviting the Countess to condolidate all her debts into one easy payment every month, of just nine pence per £10 or £9 per £1,000.
At first glance, this seems to be too good to be true. At second galnce after another shot of vodka, everything becomes very clear: it is too good to be true. They only want their nine pence paid every month. If you do that for 25 years, you will have paid the credit card company £27, and you will still owe them the original £10.
The deal does not seem quite so good now: I will give you £10 and in return you will pay me £27 and still owe me the original £10. Then we all scratch our heads and wonder how the banks make so much money.
Then they make it even easier, and let you roll the debt up. At this point, the Count runs out of fingers to do the sums. But my ever faithful retainer, Digdog, assures me that for every £1 borrowed at nine pence per month interest, rolled up for 25 years becomes an intersting £14.70. So the bargain second hand T-72 at £100,000 becomes a ruinous £1.47 million. The T-72 may not have done much damage to the enemy, but it probably wrecked the Soviet Union financially. When the true history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is written, an accountant will probably discover its true cause: some blockhead in gosplan went and bought 1000 T-72s, a few nuclear submarines and a fleet of aircraft and put them all on the plastic to make that years numbers look OK and to avoid a long holiday in a Siberian salt mine. For a while the debt looked after itself, until the local friendly bank manager started threatening to repossess a few nukes. At that point, the solids truly hit the air conditioning.
At this point it becomes clear that the private sector are at least as dangerous as the public sector when it comes to creating bullshit "cost of" calculations. I am inclining to believe that the only solution is to contact Vladimir and ask if he can supply the Count with a fleet of well armed tanks. That, as any hoodie on the street knows, is the way to command respect. No one's going start dissin' the Count when he is pointing a 128mm canon at them.
To back her case up, the Countess produced her credit card statement. It took several shots of vodka to recover from the numbers in the botom right hand corner of the statement. To add insult to injury, the card company was inviting the Countess to condolidate all her debts into one easy payment every month, of just nine pence per £10 or £9 per £1,000.
At first glance, this seems to be too good to be true. At second galnce after another shot of vodka, everything becomes very clear: it is too good to be true. They only want their nine pence paid every month. If you do that for 25 years, you will have paid the credit card company £27, and you will still owe them the original £10.
The deal does not seem quite so good now: I will give you £10 and in return you will pay me £27 and still owe me the original £10. Then we all scratch our heads and wonder how the banks make so much money.
Then they make it even easier, and let you roll the debt up. At this point, the Count runs out of fingers to do the sums. But my ever faithful retainer, Digdog, assures me that for every £1 borrowed at nine pence per month interest, rolled up for 25 years becomes an intersting £14.70. So the bargain second hand T-72 at £100,000 becomes a ruinous £1.47 million. The T-72 may not have done much damage to the enemy, but it probably wrecked the Soviet Union financially. When the true history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is written, an accountant will probably discover its true cause: some blockhead in gosplan went and bought 1000 T-72s, a few nuclear submarines and a fleet of aircraft and put them all on the plastic to make that years numbers look OK and to avoid a long holiday in a Siberian salt mine. For a while the debt looked after itself, until the local friendly bank manager started threatening to repossess a few nukes. At that point, the solids truly hit the air conditioning.
At this point it becomes clear that the private sector are at least as dangerous as the public sector when it comes to creating bullshit "cost of" calculations. I am inclining to believe that the only solution is to contact Vladimir and ask if he can supply the Count with a fleet of well armed tanks. That, as any hoodie on the street knows, is the way to command respect. No one's going start dissin' the Count when he is pointing a 128mm canon at them.
posted by Count Kostov at
11:07 am
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