Petercharles.com

For well over a year, Peter Charles has been in conversation with Barry Cells. These conversations have been recorded in Real FD (formerly Real Finance) and chart the ups and downs of the working life of Barry (a spreadsheet jockey - in other words an accountant who spends all his working life creating, recreating and amending Excel spreadsheets as part of the finance activity of any corporation). Barry - according to the blurb at the bottom of the articles - is No.3 in Blaminio’s finance department. Barry spends most of his time making heroic progress with spreadsheets, battling with his boss (only referred to as Sweaty FD) and the rest of an ungrateful and uncaring corporate world.

Of course, Barry doesn’t exist, and Blaminio is equally a fiction. However, while all characters are entirely fictional and any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely co-incidental (as they say in the best books and films), Barry and his adventures do contain a grain of truth. The columns are centred on incidents, triumphs and disasters which befall Barry and they are based on Peter Charles’s experience of spreadsheet jockeys, finance departments and corporations over the last …well a certain period of time.

The column is intended to be humorous and Peter Charles writes them in partnership with his now long-time collaborator Peter Williams, a fellow accountant. They have both been astonished at how Barry has so quickly become well recognised and liked among the Real FD readership and is considered, by the magazine’s publishers, as one of the key parts of the publication. Perhaps it is not that astonishing, we all like a story and Barry provides us with a narrative. Perhaps, more to the point, it seems all of us know someone who is like Barry... and perhaps we accountants can secretly admit to ourselves, if no-one else, that we recognise a little bit of ourselves in Barry.

See for yourselves and let us know what you think.

Peter Williams
November 2006

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