Although JCBs and other earth-crushing machinery are still very much in evidence along Commons Street, one of the current crop of buildings is almost ready for occupation. Moving to the IFSC area does mean an initial time of making your way to the office through a mudbath, so I hope the staff of Bank of Ireland Securities Services are prepared.

I'm pleased that they've named one of the buildings Mayor House, which at least reflects street names of the area. The idea of naming the building after your company - which is still prevalent in a lot of cases - shows a terminal lack of imagination as far as I'm concerned.

I was once told that PR companies recommended this strategy so that your company name was reinforced by repetition, but I still think it's boring. Mind you, I suppose it all depends on how boring or how imaginative you want a financial services company to be.

Left to the contractors, though, the names would probably be worse. Flicking through the paper on Sunday I wondered just how builders would have coped if the words Grange and Manor didn't exist. Strangely, though, the development which was built on the grounds of Kimmage Manor is not actually known as Kimmage Manor even though it seems that it would have been a perfect name.

There is, however, a development in Lucan called Grange Manor where obviously imaginations were working overtime. I suppose, though, the inhabitants of Grange Manor probably care less about imagination and more about the asset price of their bricks and mortar.

A nation not known for its imagination, the Swiss, hit the headlines on Monday as voters approved a new constitution, which gets rid of the Swiss Franc's peg to gold. This means that the government will now gradually sell off 1,300 tonnes of excess gold, which is about half the amount that the Swiss have stockpiled.

Given that gold was trading at about $330 (€311.17) per ounce last year and $283 now, it's a pity the government didn't sell earlier. The new constitution comes into effect on January 1st next year but legislation still has to be passed to authorise the gold sales which won't take place until early next year either.

I had hoped this would mean a drop off in gold prices so that I could stock up on a few pieces of jewellery myself, but the Swiss say that they'll spread the gold sales out over a number of years so that they don't disrupt the market. Typical Swiss. Initially, the market moved a little higher after the announcement but it's difficult to see gold trading at lofty levels when you know that there's a seller in the market who's going to be there for the next few years.

Part of the reason the Swiss are selling gold is to finance a humanitarian fund that the government proposed two years ago as a counter to accusations of profiteering from the second World War. Around 500 tonnes have been allocated to the fund although they haven't decided what to do with the rest. They could always give some more to the humanitarian fund, of course.

I spent some time at the coalface of industry last week. Not literally, of course, but I dropped in on NCB's excellent equity conference which gets better every year.

One thing about financial services is that you sometimes spend too much time thinking simply about the financial end of things and you need to be reminded of the actual business in which the company is involved. In the far-off days when I worked in banking I really enjoyed the times we actually got out of the office and met our clients. Tours of the factory floor were always interesting. (Maybe I would have enjoyed anything to get out of the office.)

The conference didn't put you on the factory floor, or inside the computer chip, but I managed to get hands-on experience behind the counter at McDonald's at the weekend.

Stung, no doubt, by my previous criticisms, I was contacted by the hamburger magnates who offered to show me around their Artane restaurant. Things didn't get off to a great start when I asked for the person I was due to meet, to be told that I could only have a number three breakfast. Everyone else in the queue understood what I was saying but I suppose if your day revolves around people asking for Egg McMuffins and Quarter Pounders hold the cheese, maybe a non-food request throws you a little.

The people at McDonald's keep all sorts of statistics about how many burgers they serve and how long people have to wait for them which is fascinating stuff; and it's good to know that my long wait for a Quarter Pounder and Chicken Sandwich is lurking somewhere as an unpleasant spike on the graphs of McEfficiency.

The share price has dropped by a couple of dollars since the beginning of April when it was at a high of $47.16, for which you could get a fair few Big Macs. According to the Economist magazine a few weeks ago, the euro was 11 per cent overvalued using the Big Mac index.

This measures the value of currencies by their purchasing power of a Big Mac. The average price in the US is $2.43, but in the euro zone it's €2.52 which, at the then exchange rate of just over 1.08 dollars to the euro was $2.71. The Big Mac index is obviously accurate. The euro has weakened since then - at the current exchange rate of 1.0650 the cost is $2.68. However, they were only accepting Irish pounds in Artane.

Meanwhile McDonald's took advantage of cheaper interest rates in Europe to borrow €300 million at 0.36 of a percentage point over German government paper last Thursday. Maybe it is borrowing so that it can pay the chief executive. Jack Greenberg received a 61 per cent pay increase last year, from $1.55 million to $2.51 million and, according to the company, this reflects his performance and his promotion to chief executive last August. Mr Greenberg has a keen interest in seeing the McShare price go up. He has options to purchase 1.3 million shares which would mean almost $59 million dollars by 2008 if the shares increase by 10 per cent annually.

And you thought it was just a fastfood joint.

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed-income specialist at NCB Stockbrokers