Golgafrincham

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According to the The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Golgafrincham was an over-populated planet, whose more resourceful inhabitants invented stories of impending doom to persuade their less-resourceful co-inhabitants to bugger off. Some said Golgafrincham would crash into the sun; others that the planet was to be invaded by twelve-foot piranha bees; still others that it was in danger of being eaten by an mutant star-goat.

So the resourceful Golgafrinchans decided to rid themselves of the useless third of their population — the hairdressers, telephone sanitisers, internal auditors, derivative onboarding specialists, talent acquisition directors, serial entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, executive coaches, social media consultants thought leaders and digital prophets — basically, everyone with an active LinkedIn profile. The resourceful Golgafrinchans annouced the construction of three “Ark ships”. The A ship would carry all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold the middle management third mentioned above.

To prepare the new world for the A and C Ark Ships — to be sure the planet had been properly audited and KYC’d, had appropriate HR policies and SOX attestations in place, and so on, by the time the remainder got there, the Golgafinchans sent the Ark Ship B off first. The remaining two-thirds of the population stayed behind and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a catastrophic indemnity: no-one noticed it did not carve out negligence, fraud or wilful default.

Thus, all that remains of the Golgafrinchans are those from Ark Ship B, which crashed (safely) into a small green-blue planet orbiting an unregarded yellow sun in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy. A pale blue dot.

They — I should say, we — live on in legal, credit and operational risk and control departments to this very day.