Getting Drunk in First Class

Ahh, every consultant’s duty: “Manage the relationship.” It sounds so cold, machinistic, impersonal, and even manipulative. Of course, thats what we have to do. Perception drives everything and in professional services, we sometimes have to do things that seem “stupid” or “funny” in order to send the right message or craft the right image of [...]

Ahh yes, the great consulting night-out. Grab your consulting cronies, get ‘em together after work around 8 o’clock, grab dinner at a nice restaurant, head to the hotel bar, start drinking. Then, of course, after a few rounds, head to the local pub. After even more of a few rounds, head to the club. The [...]

Its funny when you’ve flown so much that it becomes nothing but a blur. When somebody asks, “What time is your flight”, you no longer answer with, “3:23 PM.” Instead you respond with a question, “Fuck, I have no idea, I think sometime this afternoon?”
Even bigger dickheads, such as myself, forget whether or not they [...]

Here’s a little peom I wrote after my client left for two hours without turning their pager off and leaving it behind me at their desk.
Turn that pager off
The one you left behind my desk
Before I smash it
It makes my blood boil
That fucking pager of yours
turn the fucker off
It beeped the again
Asshole, turn that fucker [...]

I was sitting in a manager-led meeting onsite at the client a while back and felt the urge to capture for posterity just how inane this fucking meeting was. So I whipped out my cellphone and surreptitiously started a voice recording. I transcribed the recording in its full glory for your viewing pleasure. [...]

Usually, we think of point whores which, by nature, we are. Of course, thats a given. What about status though?
We like to get it at our favorite hotels and airlines and rental car companies. The thing we often fail to realize is that we can trade our status and equalize it on another similar, competing [...]

Yep, thats me, total dickhead, who slips his oversize carry-on sideways into the overhead bin everytime. Why? Because my bag barely fits on its own and I usually stuff it so much that it eeks out the remaining length and causes it to be just a tiny bit to large to fit length-wise. So, of [...]

If you haven’t seen this CLM, there’s an infamous email that has made its rounds through all of the Big 4 firms and many others. It all started when a regional partner sent out this email:
To: All Office Employees
From: Charlie Karlson
Subject: Thank Your Mentor Day
January is National [...]

Yea, bitch. We stuck it to the client. We said, fuck, lets get out of this shit-hole state of Iowa on a Wednesday and fly to Cancun, Mexico.
Goal 1 - Sit like dickheads on the fucking beach and sip Mai Tai’s and tell the monkey’s keep our glasses full.
Goal 2 - Continue to bill hours [...]

Face it. If you’re a consultant, chances are you are, or were a complete dick head at one point in time. At the pinnacle of that dickheadedness is getting upgraded to first class on your flight back home and getting sloshed before you walked off the plane. There’s only one problem about these dickheaded stories; [...]