*Boondoggle: ‘a project that is considered a useless waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.’ Wikipedia
Brief though the episode was, between late 1968 and early 1970 I was a trainee banker. A class of callow youths (all white males) gathered in the City of London to be mentored by a retired manager out of Tierra del Fuego. We probed the elusive mysteries of double-entry book-keeping and fractional banking. Labelled ‘ambitious, but quiet and dignified’, I was dispatched to Montevideo in Uruguay. A few months later the clerks there walked out on strike for decent pay. They were promptly ‘militarized’ – charged with desertion if they failed to return to work. A corpulent colonel occupied the manager’s office while troopers frogmarched a few captured clerks back to their desks. I made my escape, convinced that the key to successful banking lay hidden far too deep in the excruciating tedium of it all.
