Non-accountants make fun of accountants; in this book an accountant makes fun of accountants. Grant Tait has been one for 50 years. The ICAEW even presented him with a certificate to prove it. After all this time, he feels has earned the right to have a little fun with the serious subject of accounting. He has found 80 ways that accountants make us laugh, collected into short articles to explain how entertaining they can be.

Accountants sometimes write silly sentences in official documents, for instance in accounting standards and annual reports, without realising what they have written and certainly without meaning to amuse us. They also invent accounting jargon which can reach the level of ludicrous.

After boarding school in Scotland and an accounting apprenticeship in England where he qualified with the ICAEW, Grant Tait was an auditor in London and Paris. By this time he had saved enough money to pay for an MBA at INSEAD in France.

His career continued in the European HQ of a US company in Paris, then three years in Switzerland as Finance Director. Thereafter, he worked in Europe with multinational companies for 35 years.

This involved intensive travel which was fun. Travel included projects abroad: distribution agreements in Tokyo and Amsterdam, new offices in Barcelona, fraud in Geneva, and meetings all over the world. He managed teams in USA, and around Europe.

In his 30’s, he wrote articles making fun of management decisions in multinationals. They were published in various professional magazines such as Management Today, Personnel Journal and Management Accounting. However, to protect his job, he had to write anonymously because his company could be identified.

He worked for several bosses who never made decisions. This resulted in his first book after he retired: How to become a no-decision manager which won a silver medal from the Non-Fiction Authors Association in USA.