Getting Drunk in First Class

TD consultants deal in huge volumes of bullshit. I suppose that’s why every one of us spends our first day on the job dreaming of first class junkets to Mumbai while a parade of IT and HR leeches quotes company policy at us. By drilling an incomprehensible load of crap into your skull, they quickly disabuse you of any notion that your job will make use of such abstract nonsense as “ethics” and “honesty.”

By the time we break for our first 90 minute, $50 lunch the next day, we’ve figured out everything they told us at orientation was the absolute, 180-degree opposite of the truth. No matter what it may say in the personnel policy, one of our key job duties is to crack as many racist and sexist jokes as possible. And I’m pretty new to the industry, but despite having accrued only Premier Dickhead status, I’m sure you’d score major points if you exposed yourself at the client site. That all goes double if there are women or minorities working on the team.

Oh, but won’t they file a complaint, you ask? Fuck no! If you were a grade-A asshole, would you want to explain to some Liberal Studies grad how an off-color joke (or an “on-color” joke, for that matter) hurt your precious little feelings? Besides, true consultants love it when people joke about them. It makes them the center of attention, which—after a European airline’s lie-flat first class bed—is the one place consultants always want to be.

HR’s idea of a consulting team

Of course, HR will make a very half-assed attempt to scold the misogyny and prejudice out of their new consultants, if only to satisfy the legal requirements of the pussies at the EEOC. My firm had us watch a video about some company that was apparently staffed half with Extreme Ghostbusters rejects, and half with old white men whose job was to harass and belittle the cripples and women and brown people in the company. (Oddly enough, the white men in the video were actually not consultants.) The narrative was your typical “IT Guy pursues semi-hot New Girl, and New Girl isn’t really interested, but she doesn’t want to hurt IT Guy’s feelings, and she likes the attention anyway, so she doesn’t say anything and the situation escalates into full-blown unwelcome groping.” (At least, I assume it did, by that point I was too busy napping and dreaming of the hottie who explained our expense policy.) The video was intended to be a caution against harassment, but it actually comes across as more of a warning against working with or making sexual advances toward complete fucking retards.

HR departments exist in consulting firms, not to enforce personnel policies or track expenses or any of that horseshit, but to sharpen the dickheads’ bullshitting skills. Once you’ve signed your name on their dotted lines and charmed the HR chicks into thinking you care, “serving” the client comes naturally.