It's The Seminar Season

You can tell when the Summer is over and the long evenings are upon us because the CPE Seminar Season kicks-in. CPE = Continuing Professional Education and is something us accountants and auditors must do in case one of Her Maj's inspectors ever finds their way beyond the M25.

I usually attend Salisbury race course on Tuesday afternoons but tomorrow's is at Southampton (St.Mary's) football ground for an update on our computer software. I'm not the most sociable animal when it comes to attending these events, when we go to Salisbury I usually spend the tea break walking the course, just to avoid weighty discussions on the new International Standards of Accounting or the latest FRS - it's okay you can wake up at the back. Perhaps tomorrow I'll manage to find my way out onto the pitch and write 'WHUFC' on a goalpost in black ink.

The best ones are of course the residentials, I went to one at Bristol University one year, it was a Friday to Sunday affair and I made the (honest) mistake of wearing my suit on the Friday morning - boy did I get the piss taken out of me that night in the students bar. There was so much course material I was beginning to wonder what exciting aspect of accountancy it was that drew me in in the first place.

Anyway, at the half day courses you can always guarantee that about 20% of the audience will vanish at tea break, you have to sign in when you arrive to qualify for the 4 points you get for attending and so a lot of people just leave half way through - which is a bit of an insult really.
The colleague I go with always reckons I'm asleep in the second half, I'm not - or at least I don't think I ever have been, it's just that the air-con is on so high the room has all the life sucked out of it.

The thing about accountants, and I don't know if this is the same for other professions, is that nobody wants to look stupid in front of their peers. This means that the Q and A session usually involves one swotty type asking a question that is the aural equivalent of mogadon before the lecturer says "Okay that's it," and the car park resembles the start of the Le Mans 24 Hour back in the days before Health and Safety took hold.

Ah, now who was it who said Accountancy wasn't boring?


As a postscript the facilities at St.Mary's were very good but the ground itself is tiny and plasticy. One of the seminar hosts was a bit peeved when he saw a sign that said boxes were available at £63 per person for the season with a minimum of ten people - he'd just bought his Chelsea tickets that morning at £49 per person for one game! It's funny being in an empty football ground, no markings on the pitch, goals pushed back against the stands and the other thing that struck me as odd was the lack of floodlights - new stadia just don't need the big old pylons - the builders fix hundreds of downlighters onto the bottom of the stand roof instead.