Well...
Pep = Pep Guardiola
Obe = Obi Wan Kenobi
Juli = Julius Caesar
I have no idea bout the last one
But if you will drink in such esteemed company, then you should expect a cracker of a drinks bill!
We're certain that plenty of Reg readers have at one time or another been given short shrift by the company finance department for presenting a dodgy receipt as part of an expenses claim. Last weekend, though, we obtained a bit of paper which we reckon would be hard to beat if you're determined to be shown the beancounters' …
When I was in France it was common practice for a bar waiter to give you a printed receipt with each order.
When you paid they ripped the receipts almost in half to signify the receipt was paid. Add in the fact that I hardly ever saw a receipt with the correct date and time on it, and the wisest course of action was to submit them to the French accounts department, not the English one.
You missed a trick - it's common in French restaurants to ask for a non-itemized bill for your "note de frais". It's quicker for the restaurants too rather than making separate itemized bills when you've got a group of people eating out. With the added bonus of your accounts department not having to know that you had €20 worth of drinks as part of your €35 dinner.
Adding up terraza and the box at the bottom in the middle with the arrow pointing to the terraza box you get 89 euros. So the barman was numerically dyslexic, surprisingly in his favour, and decided that 98 was close enough. Or more probably thought you'd had so much to drink that 8 and 9 in any order would be the same to you.
"But please, tell me how on earth you can pass on the Sunday afternoon drinks with your mates as expenses? I need to know!"
team-building exercise, preparatory to attempt to fly rocket plane, emergency planning meeting, sales meeting, team away-day... One must use one's imagination.
In our books, anything that goes under 'marketing' is likely to be more or less dodgy. Appropriate given that's a good definition of the activity.
I once had a very important finance meeting with the MD of one of our suppliers. On the terrace of a rather nice curry house, overlooking a park, on a sunny Saturday evening. I'm sure he put the excellent curry, 2 bottles of wine, coffees and brandies through the books. The fact that the meeting component was finished before I'd finished my first poppadom is irrelevant.
A few years ago I put a skull & crossbones on a 4' flagpole through the books. It was a present for a retiring partner - to go on his grand children's climbing frame in his garden. I still get marketing email from the flag company now.
"Lester, I don't mind this, erm, receipt thing. But please, tell me how on earth you can pass on the Sunday afternoon drinks with your mates as expenses? I need to know!"
Easy - Lester managed to get an entire article about his expenses published - that's how. (Of course if the article hadn't been published, then it might have been harder)
Had one once when went with couple of other people at a conference to a restaurant. The receipt for all of us was a handwritten note that just said "Meal: 135 euros" (well, it said that in Italian) and when we asked for seperate receipts we got an extra 2 copies of the same note! Anyway accounts dept didn't raise any issue.
Scene: Celebrity auction for charity.
Players: Mostly TV & Tabloid Media types (B-Ark, bottom feeding scum that give rabies a good name)
Action: The cutest blondes get given gorillas in cash (thousands, Sydyny stylee) by Media types (claimable expense)
Blondes win auctions, get multiple receipts. They pocket one, media types share receipts out amongst themselves.
Monday morning: media types claim thousands on expense (from shareholders, ultimately), later claim 100% on tax (as one can do here for "charity" - multiple times from taxpayers)
Result: ALL "charities" in Austfailia are actually horrific loss-making money sinks for the government; effectively taking money away from actually like, you know, providing services. Oxygen-thief upper management effectively just take money from the till, legally. Technically it's all fraud, but who does one actually complain to? ICAC? Most of the Commission were in the room!
Austfailia: You're Standing In It.
Mind you I suspect every Western plutocracy is exactly the same.
This seems all very reasonable. In the bar we expats meet up at in Manzanares el Real, a single beer will cost you 2.50€, the tapa will be a couple of crisps and if you buy food it comes with bread you could build houses from. The when you do the maths, you still can't work out how 3 beers=9.37€
hahaha .... used to be the same 20+ years ago when I went there a few times .... once when my sister was on a choir tour there one of her friends decided that he just had to have a GnT sitting outside Florian's in St Mark square whatever it cost - this was 25 years ago and I think even then it was something like £10 as soon as your bum hit the chair and the drinks were similar amounts on top!
As for me ... order espresso at bar and drink standing there ... fraction of the price!
"...I have no idea ... who on God's Green Earth Antonio Colorino might be."
According to a well-known search engine, he arrived at Ellis Island on 11 June 1905, aged 21.
So he was that really really old bloke that was sitting inside out of the sun - the one you tripped over on your way to the toilet. Nice to see him still getting out.
Having just got back from Rome with a very similar scrap of paper with multiple names (none of which ours), ambiguous figures and some italian writing - I feel you pain.
I will however say that I paid it never the less as the other option was to get out my translator and argue the toss.... to time consuming!
I know Spain is cheaper than the colder bits of Europe, but still.... If I were to spend 4 hours in a bar drinking with seven friends and we were only charged 98 euros, we would be laughing all the way to the bank, regardless if we were in Spain or say, Belgium.
Let's see: drink 3 beers/hr for 4 hours = 12 beers. With 8 persons this makes 96 beers. At 2 euros per beer: 192 euros in drinks alone. Some snacks could add say 10 -20 euros....
Can I have the address of that bar you vist?
Barmen often use nicknames to identify their customers. Antonio Colorino could have been someone named Antonio who is maybe a painter, or dresses loudly, or has a funny skin tone (colorino is a diminutive of "color", although it could even be an actual surname).
Pep (Josep) and Juli are just regular Catalan names, "obe" I have no idea, and Pascual is not a heavy drinker.
I think I see at least one Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster on that list.
Seems completely fair to me - we all know that numbers in restaurants / bistros / pubs are unlike any other numbers in the entire universe.
This is pure Bistromatics - and you'd be hard pressed to put in an expense claim without visiting yet another restaurant to sort the last bill out.
My other half, being a maths teacher, would never have let a sloppy bit of work like that go unchallenged. At the very least the incorrect addition would be brought sternly to the proprietor's attention. All items would have to be clearly identified. If there were any offers (BOGOF, happy hour, menu del dia, etc.) that applied, they would be carefully optimised and combined to minimise the bill. The proprietor would also be very lucky if he wasn't instructed to write it all out neatly before we left. Finally, if we were a group, everyone would be informed of exactly what their contribution should be.
Some people just can't leave their work behind.
On eBay there are lots of nice receipt printers available. It takes a small bit of software to make it look right and maybe a bit extra for the expense of the receipt printer. You could even add nice logos and make it look VERY official. Even better to make up receipts for others, a cottage industry. As a side comment, I see a BOFH episode here.
You want a receipt, I'll give you a receipt. Kinda like if you want a green coat, turn on a green light!
I am reliably informed that one Fleet St hack/legend/etc. once placed a UKP 1000 claim (sans receipt) for "a camel", which was paid by accounts. At the time, the jargon for an expenses claim was something like "swindle sheet". Other claims by the same person apparently included "a yacht", "a tent", etc.
I quite like the German approach of tick marks on beermats - it's very easy to understand, even after many tick marks on your beermat.
Sadly, the expense department at a previous employer felt that a beermat full of tick marks with the total written in the middle did not qualify as a proper receipt.