Training budget is a splash in the pan

You’d think writing a witty piece about toilet paper would be a doddle for so fine a proponent of toilet humour as Guru. Management Centre Europe (MCE) sent through a press release deriding the fact that businesses spend more on toilet paper than they do on external management training.

Apparently, its analysis of various bits of research found that £1.58bn was invested in leadership training and development in 2003, while £2.04bn was spent by firms globally on toilet and hand tissue over the next 12 months.

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The problem with making gags about this kind of thing is that all the best toilet-based jokes have already been done. It is well known that the entire stockpile of lavatory humour was exhausted in the 1980s and early ’90s by British comics such as Rowan Atkinson, Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson.

This leaves writers in the new millennium rather at a loss. Guru can but query MCE’s reasoning behind its outburst. Does it want companies to cut back on toilet paper provision in favour of executive training? One feels that protests at such a move would be even greater than the recent unrest over pensions, which incidentally are going down the toilet as well.