The Writers' Circle

**Gets a bit political at the end, but couldn't think of another way to end it -sorry! **

Accountancy Donkeys.

You don't see many donkeys around nowadays. It's not that surprising of course, a donkey can carry less than a mule, it runs slower than a horse and provides neither milk nor meat.
At one time practically every other household had a donkey in the garden, but no longer. This is entirely due to the invention of the pocket calculator of course.
You see, donkeys may not be much use as providers of hamburger meat, but they are fantastically good at maths, and before pocket calculators came along people would keep a donkey in order to help them plan the family finances. If you had a really difficult sum to do - how many spoons you would have left after a divorce settlement perhaps - then the donkey would be able to tell you the number exactly. Bah! You might say, the number of spoons left would be easy to calculate, it would be half the number you started with. If you had twenty spoons before the ex-love of your life sheered off in a different direction from you, then you would end up with ten. However, if you asked the donkey what the number would be, he would tell you either the number nine, or the number eleven, and he would always be right. This is because not only are donkeys very good at maths, they are also brilliant at reading human nature. The donkey would know which one of the humans would pinch an extra spoon from their partner out of spite or greed thus altering the obvious number. All very useful if you are going to have a dinner party to celebrate your divorce and have invited nine other people along to it.

Donkeys are so good at this sort of thing, that all businesses connected with finance used to employ them. In the 1960's if you asked your bank manager for a loan, he would normally pop out the back to discuss it with the bank's donkey before returning to say that you couldn't have any money.
It all changed following NASA's successful Apollo moon missions. NASA took the decision very early on not to involve donkeys in the planning or execution of all of their missions. They figured that they had enough computing power to work out how to get an oversized metal trash-can from Earth to wherever it was going and back again without having to check with a donkey every five minutes. They were perfectly right in this assumption. The space missions were planned as an engineering problem and human instinct was kept to an absolute minimum. Although astronauts were used, they were all highly disciplined former air force pilots extensively trained to do exactly what they were told to do. If you had put a plumber on board of Apollo 11 he would have spent the first ten minutes pressing all of the buttons and messing about with the cd player, and the thing would never have got off the ground.

The space programme generated a huge amount of interest, as well as a number of useful spin-offs including the non-stick frying pan and affordable pocket calculators. The banks and finance houses thought that if NASA could put a man on the moon without recourse to donkeys, then working out Mr Smith's mortgage payments using the now widely available calculators could be done in the same manner.
As the donkeys retired from their service in the financial sector they were replaced by people using computers and calculators, although it is believed that the Inland Revenue still keep a few in the back yard just in case they have some really difficult sums to do.
Donkeys were now seen as old fashioned and anachronistic. If you wanted to be at the cutting edge of the new technological age you got rid of your donkey and went down to Woolworths and bought a pocket calculator. As a result donkeys began to disappear both from the gardens and also from the collective psyche. The donkeys that remained were banished to the countryside and relegated to calculating the growth rate of the grass that they stood on.

Now individual donkeys are quite placid creatures, they don't ask for much out of life. Give them an amusing straw hat and a handful of carrots and they're reasonably happy. But collectively they are a different proposition entirely.
As donkeys fell more and more out of favour, even the meagre fare of straw hats and carrots began to dry up, and large numbers of donkeys found themselves in donkey sanctuaries. Within these close confines the seeds of revolutionary fervour were sown by a disgruntled old donkey by the name of Sally, who at one time had been the steadying force behind the governor of the Bank of England. With her oratory skills she incited the other donkeys into taking punitive retaliation against the people who had treated them so shabbily. Over the next few years heavily disguised donkeys infiltrated their way into the major finance houses across the world. This was fairly straightforward as most of the human workers were so engrossed in their work that they rarely glanced up from the computer screen, and those that did, barely registered the fact that they might be sitting next to a donkey. For as anyone who has worked in international finance will tell you, most bankers on Wall Street have long hairy faces and big ears - Including some of the men.

The donkeys grasp of mathematics and human nature was put to stunning effect. Not only were they able to add numbers together, and manage the even more difficult task of taking numbers away, but by writing large numbers down on reports and adding dollar signs they were able to exploit the twin weaknesses of all bankers; those of laziness and greed.
They proposed that if the banks lent money which they did not have, to people who could not pay it back, guaranteed by property that was worth less than the money lent on it, the banks would somehow make money out of it all. It has to be said that they did not put the case quite like that, and hid the actual meaning within the pages of voluminous proposal documents, but as the people they were pitching it to only read the figures on the front and back pages it didn't matter. The banks embarked on a lending frenzy.

Within a year it had all gone horribly wrong for the banks. The people they had lent money to had squandered some of it on food and utility bills, and had been unable to re-pay the banks, who now became the possessors of properties that were worth less than the amount they had been bought for, and as it had been notional money rather than the folding stuff that had bought said properties, they were forced to sell at a loss thus bankrupting themselves. It was doubly ironic because there was very few people able to buy the houses back from them as no-one could now get a loan from the bank to buy things with.

Some of the donkeys were paid off by the banks and forced to leave, but they didn't care. They had made their point, and knew that the humans were too vain to admit that they were wrong and too proud to ask the donkeys to help them resolve the problem. They returned to the donkey sanctuaries with enough money to keep them in straw hats and carrots for years. The remainder stayed at the banks and finance houses entertaining themselves by writing more and more absurd proposals to recover the money they themselves had caused the humans to lose.

So if you have found yourself to be the owner of a worthless house, or homeless, or unemployed, or broke because of the recession, at least you have the comfort of knowing that it is due to the greed of the bankers and the donkeys they employ.