Andersen Consulting

A decade ago, I used to make this witticism about companies that were crawling with employees who weren't employees, but rather consultants from Andersen:

It's like an evil alien parasite in a science fiction story that enters your body and gives you weird superpowers. Like now that you have the slug from the planet Zax living in your small intestines you now only need to sleep two hours a night and can see into the deep infrared. But music only sounds like noise to you now. And you have started blinking your eyes disconcertingly often. And then you have started to develop troubling cravings. So you go to the doctor, and you're like, whoa, get me off of this train. But he runs a bunch of tests and tells you that if you remove the slug, it will kill the host.

Whoops.

This metaphor turns out to have multiple applications.