Pauli exclusion principle of beancounters...
I'm surprised he didn't experience a significant repulsive force out of a convenient open window...
Only to experience the "solidity" provided by electron clouds on landing.
BOFH: Schrödinger's petty cash puts us in a very awkward superposition
Official BOFH logo (red rotary telephone with devil's tal and devil's horns) BOFH logo EPISODE 16: "So it looks like we have ourselves a Schrödinger's cash situation," I say. "We have a what now?" asks the very junior beancounter - the sort that will be first up against the wall when the AI revolution comes (in a couple of …
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Friday 28th August 2026 13:55 GMT Charlie Clark
Maybe time for an experiment…
In the beancounter's room there is a radioactive source – a Vindaloo Special from the Bombay Palace – if the detector notices/smells the curry the electric chair, to which the junior beancounter has been tied, will be activated…
The anthropic principle (aka Exit via the IPO) dictates that until an observer looks at the room, the beancounter is both dead and alive. Who wants to switch on the camera?
There are two kinds of people: those who admit they don't understand quantum physics and liars…
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Friday 28th August 2026 09:52 GMT Moldskred
Re: Quantum cash theory ...
Douglas Adams got there before you:
“Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.” -- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
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Friday 28th August 2026 10:09 GMT Doctor Syntax
One of the annoyances of life in the Civil Service was somehow never getting paid expenses for court attendance because we claimed through the office and not through the court like most witnesses. There was always some IR regulation that they found to make whatever they said was correct last time invalid this time. I suppose I could have brought matters to a head, or at least resolved it, by claiming through the court system instead but in the end quitting was more effective.
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Friday 28th August 2026 21:24 GMT Terry 6
Petty cash
everyone else hates it because the petty cash reimbursement process is subject to a level of scrutiny that His Majesty's Customs and Revenue can only aspire to
This always used to wind me up no end. Getting the odd fiver reimbursed was always a real pain, whereas people could spend a small fortune of tax payer money on some expensive and unsuitable device it it was bought through official channels.
And of course the staff time wasted with the pettiness of petty cash far outweighed the amount of cash being reclaimed
Penny wise pound foolish accounting.
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Saturday 29th August 2026 03:35 GMT theblackhand
Re: Petty cash
"Penny wise pound foolish accounting."
You are equating the high cost of claiming small amounts as inefficiency rather than acknowledging that the rorting of easy to use expense systems is so wide spread that small kingdoms are often built.
For examples, see previous episodes of the BOFH focussing on paying for beer or large IT acquisitions. Or real life...
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Friday 28th August 2026 23:51 GMT Blackjack
[8753?" I ask.
"Sorry?"
"8753 - the reverse of the PIN number you used to unlock your computer just now," ]
Is this the 90s? A 4 numbers PIN number is so unsafe it is ridiculous.
If you wanna lock the computer then remove the battery and use a real life safe that weights more that a 1930s dishwasher.
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Monday 31st August 2026 18:55 GMT doublelayer
IOS makes you use six digits unless you specifically override it, increased from 4 some time around 2013. Android seems to let you do whatever you want. I asked a few people around me for some values to report, and the IOS users all said six, two Android users said 4, one 6, and one 7. Not a great sample size, but for what it's worth, that's what I could collect.
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Saturday 29th August 2026 08:13 GMT blu3b3rry
Current workplace doesn't have petty cash
....and it's frigging annoying. There have been a large number of occasions where accounts have moaned about having to process scattered expenses for bits and bobs needed in test setups, like a £3 bag of screws or a plastic washing-up bowl. I think the current time expenditure on processing lots of tiny expenses claims has so far outweighed that of maintaining a petty cash system.
On the topic of other expenses I found myself butting heads with accounts when preparing to head to Florida for three weeks to support a US roll-out. Apparently "technicians aren't eligible for company cards" despite my boss's boss having put me down for one.
After much poring over policies we couldn't find anything that explicitly stated who was or wasn't eligible, and the card was duly issued with much grumbling. Came in handy when I arrived at the hotel and was promptly landed with a $600 "resort fee" that our travel agency hadn't paid up-front....
Icon - How I felt after three weeks living out of a hotel room in Florida in the middle of June, especially with what passed for food in that place....
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Sunday 30th August 2026 16:20 GMT jlturriff
And then there's funny money...
The global facilities management company I worked for had an inter-departmental billing system that ostensibly was used to track each department's value in relation to the others'. At least one department, the networking folks, set their imaginary rates so high that departments that would otherwise use their services instead used outside providers, spending real money instead of the fake money, because the accountants didn't differentiate between real money and funny money.
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Sunday 30th August 2026 20:57 GMT Lup
I do love expense limits - having worked for a loose arm of the Civil Service, I once got our vendor to sell us a rack of servers in as many pieces as possible. Absolute nightmare of a warranty situation, but by god did it beat going through procurement. Each piece of the package squeaked in, as 15 separate requests for 5-10k bits of equipment.
Meaning we avoided the 6 month tender process, and so also got to spend the money, as you are rewarded in government departments for not spending your budget by losing it at the end of each year. And sometimes having that amount cut from the overall budget.
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Sunday 30th August 2026 20:58 GMT bandwagonGT
Respect
The disrespectful use of ‘beancounter’ for accountants and the perjorative comments about them below this article aren’t acceptable to this poster. Yes, I’m an accountant who reads The Register. If you think that accountants study for 4 years to count beans and pay out petty cash, then you’re probably the sort of person who disrespectfully refers to a doctor as a ‘quack’. Petty cash is as annoying to those who pay it out (not normally an accountant) as it is to those who claim it. Can we please have a bit of mutual respect?
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Monday 31st August 2026 15:08 GMT Danilo
Re: Respect
Perhaps you have not noticed, but we are talking about "Bastard Operator From Hell" series, helped with a Pimply-Faced Youth (PFY) — who is training to become BOFH themselves — and calling an accountant a "beancounter" is probably the least of their inappropriate transgressions.
And to be honest, not many would take up the "Operator" job role anymore either (even "sysadmin" is no longer in vogue), and PFY is not the most polite naming either.
It's great that an accountant is reading The Register, but techies do take jokes on the chin, and sometimes wear them as badges of honour even — so I can only advise the same for this historical dark humour series, or skipping it altogether.
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Monday 31st August 2026 19:04 GMT doublelayer
Re: Respect
This comment suggests you are new to the BOFH articles. As you've probably noticed, they're fictional articles about a sociopathic system administrator. Said administrator is also a very prolific serial killer and, from my reading of the article, it seems quite likely that the petty cash repayments he was going for this time might have been mostly fraud (and even if they aren't, previous editions have included plenty of certain fraud), so terms you don't like for accountants are perhaps not the worst of his fictional crimes.
That I can put down to someone who doesn't know what the BOFH is. The rest of your comment can't be justified so easily. Many of the comments expressing criticism of accountancy are complaining about real things that real accountants did, and their criticisms aren't showing disrespect to the entire field, but individual choices made by practitioners. I'm going to assume that you were put off enough by the BOFHisms you weren't prepared for that you're overreacting to those criticisms.
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Tuesday 8th September 2026 09:10 GMT bandwagonGT
Re: Respect
Patronising me and playing down the insulting of a member of a profession are unhelpful. Calling someone a name to amuse yourself is bullying, after all. Would you stand for it the other way around, I wonder. We all have a sense of humour, but this awful trope should be consigned to the time of Ancient Egypt where it belongs. Accountants are sick to death of hearing it every time their job is mentioned.
The complaints that have been made about claiming petty cash are made from a selfish point of view. The complainants should know that every penny of an organisation’s assets, petty cash included, is under the stewardship of accountants who are bound by The Companies Act, Financial Reporting Standards, Money Laundering Regulations, Internal Audit, External Audit, HMRC VAT inspections, HMRC Corporation Tax reviews as well as their accounting bodies’ own professional standards. There is no room for, ‘it’s only a fiver - don’t bother getting receipts or a signature’.
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Tuesday 8th September 2026 16:34 GMT doublelayer
Re: Respect
It was not my intention to patronize you. I assumed that you were unfamiliar with the BOFH because that would make your complaints more reasonable. If you are already familiar with it, then my response would be even less to your liking: "It's a fictional article about a guy who hates everybody minus one person some of the time, insults everybody, and murders many of them. Fictional characters use insulting language without the author necessarily sharing those opinions, as demonstrated by quite a lot of books. People who enjoy fiction don't endorse behavior of characters. Get used to that."
As for the opinions of comments regarding actual accountancy procedures, take it up with them. They experience problems from the way the current system runs, the same way accountants experience difficulties from things that individual employees are doing with money. We'd all like to improve it, and we all come at it from different perspectives where processes can hinder what we're trying to do. That is something I, as a programmer in security, and many others as IT administration and support need to do. We all also have our regulations and policies which we have good reasons to enforce, and they also cause problems, and by understanding what problems, we can make it nicer. Or we can get insulted that someone says that our policy is causing them serious problems, pretend that makes them "selfish", and ignore the situation out of a sense of victimhood. The latter approach often doesn't work, but whether it does or not, it certainly does not increase respect for ourselves, our teams, or our profession among those who have to live with the results. Since I often have to tell people to do things or not to do things for security reasons, I have similar experiences of being told my work is pointless and causing problems. While I frequently disagree with their opinions, I don't take the same attitude you have.
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