Saturday 24 April 2010

Monkey Business


A man walks into a shop, the sign says “One Stop Shop for Business”, around the walls he sees a bank of cages. Another customer walks in and says to the shopkeeper, "I'll have a C monkey, please".

The shopkeeper nods, goes over to a cage at the side of the shop and takes out a monkey. He fits a collar and leash and hands it to the customer, saying "That'll be £5,000". The customer pays and walks out with his monkey.

Startled, the man goes over to the shopkeeper and says, "That was a very expensive monkey, most of them are only a few hundred pounds. Why did it cost so much?"
"Oh", says the shopkeeper, "that monkey can program in C very fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the money."

The man starts to look at the monkeys in the cage. He says to the shop keeper, "That one's even more expensive, £10,000! What does it do?" "Oh", says the shopkeeper, "that one's a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some Java, all the really useful stuff."

The man looks around a little longer and sees a third monkey in a cage on its own. The price tag round its neck says £50,000. He gasps to the shop keeper, "That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?"

"Well," says the shopkeeper, "I’ve never actually seen it do anything but it says it's a Consultant."

Sarah Tiddy FAPA
PS. We had one of these recently to advise us on HR matters!

1 comment:

Gareth, APA said...

Hi Sarah,

A great story and one I can agree with; I have spent more than a few pounds funding Consultants who have 'borrowed my watch and told me the time'.

However I have to stress that APA does not subscribe to the principle of caging monkeys (however we are far less principled abot Consultants. Our own Shelley Young is a passionate adopter of Orang Utans!