The DeVere Grand Hotel, Brighton

My room, appropriately “old-school” five-star chic

Bathroom, which was bigger than my bedroom at home

Well, it was one heck of a party – I understand the bill was around £120,000, or about £600 per person.

Apparently, I won the “award” for being the best-dressed, as I was the only one who was wearing patent shoes and one of the very few who knew how to tie a bow-tie. Consequently, I was on bow-tying duty for much of the early evening.

Matt demonstrates his knowledge of bow-tying

It was the first big corporate evening I’ve been out to with the complete team, and it turned up being a very boozy evening. It was great – all the real gossip comes out on these sorts of nights. I now know who’s perceived as being strong on the team, who’s perceived as being weak, where the smart money is on who’ll make partner first, and most importantly, who’s sleeping with whom…

I managed to hit the sack (relatively) early at 1:30am, but a harden core of drinkers continued drinking until 5am. The evening was marked by the sort of carnage that heavy drinking brings on – at one point, one of my colleagues fell sound asleep at the dinner table. Another threatened to dance on the bar and had to be held back. And I went to bed early – there’s no telling what happened as the night went on.

The head of our advisory services practice is a youngish, energetic guy who likes to go jogging each morning. As he headed out of the building at 6:30am, he discovered one of our consultants sound asleep on the couch in the lobby of the hotel – still fully-dressed in black tie.

As you would expect, day two of the conference was largely a write-off. Two-hundred consultants with hangovers operating on three hours of sleep is hardly the recipe for success. There was more than one person sleeping during the presentations, and I was feeling quite smug for having been so diligent about heading to bed at a reasonable hour.

One of our corporate values is that we challenge and debate as ‘ferocious friends’. To help foster this environment, we had a two-hour session dedicated to debate, with each group given a debate topic to prepare. I’m not sure whether my topic was lucky or was the short straw, but it was the most interesting: “Are partners paid too much?”

I was arguing on the “Yes” side – and among other team members, there were seven partners on my team. All of whom had to argue that yes, in fact, they were paid too much – and preparing the arguments to justify their statements. We won the debate in the end. We were issued with our prize and the partners were issued with instructions to “please leave their wallets by the door on the way out!”

Ms Squeaky update: In an unrelated piece of news, I have surrendered my seat in the first carriage of the train, and now sit in carriage four. I’m delighted to report that it’s as tranquil and quiet as a church.

Apparently, it’s British Sausage Week. They’ve gone a bit mad in our canteen, offering fifteen different varieties of sausage over the course of the week, along with a bit of a marketing campaign (for example, sausages are the most popular barbeque food in the UK (49% of BBQs), followed by beef burgers (38%) and poultry (37%). Despite average partnership profits of £686K per partner this year, it does seem like we’re wasting good money here.

After two weeks of peace and quiet, Ms. Squeaky made her return to the train. She declared herself victorious to the entire carriage and then proceeded to (yep, you guessed it) call all of her friends to let them know her news. I’ve just about given up, and am debating whether to buy a cell-phone jammer (illegal but satisfying) or whether I should simply move to another carriage. L’enfer, c’est les autres indeed!

Off to a swanky 5-star hotel in Brighton for a corporate piss-up tonight — black tie event with loads of champagne. They’ve got a spa as well, so I’m thinking about sneaking off for an hour for a massage. Tomorrow’s a day of team-building. Sometimes I’m amazed I get paid to do all this. At the risk of repeating myself, despite average partnership profits of £686K per partner this year, it does seem like we’re wasting good money here.

Still, I like champagne. Who am I to question the wisdom of the partners?

A brief update from the world of work…

As nice as it was to have a short break over the weekend, Monday morning came early and it was time to head back to work. A few important updates:

1. Still no sign of Ms Squeaky or her nemesis. I can’t say that I’m shedding too many tears as I enjoy my quiet commute into the office.
2. The bid team that I was asked to join on Friday finally finished pulling together the bid at 3am Saturday morning. We’re supposed to hear whether we were successful later this week, and the client is targeting an immediate start around the world. We’re sending consultants to Amsterdam, California, Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai. It’s a great travel for those who like frequent flyer miles.
3. I’m going to meet with my client to go through the final sales presentation on Friday morning. If I’m successful, there’s every chance that I’ll be living out of the Sheraton at Heathrow Airport for the next nine months, driving the same commute I left my last job to get away from!

As Alanis Morissette would say, “Isn’t it ironic?”

I’m not sure whether we’ve got a case of détente or mutually-assured destruction, but neither Ms Squeaky nor the man who confronted her have shown their face on my train again. Which suits me fine – I get to ride into work in peace and quiet each morning, safe in the knowledge that the most stressful part of my journey is working out the Sudoku puzzle in the Times.

So another week’s over at last. Got one bid out the door and was enjoying the brief lull in activity when I got dragged into another one this afternoon. Words that are never music to a consultant’s ears on a Friday afternoon: “Do you have some time free to help us get an urgent proposal for a priority client out the door?”

To a novice consultant, this means “would you like to get involved in an interesting piece of work with one of our most important clients, which we’ll surely win and for which you’ll receive praise and glory?”

To a jaded cynic like myself, however, this means “would you like to give up your weekend to do a rush-job for partners who will criticize you for not doing a perfect job (despite no direction, limited input, and impossible deadlines) for a deal that we’re probably not going to win anyhow, and piss off a ton of other partners as you try to do a credential-gathering exercise when most of them are relaxing at their weekend houses?” Uh, no thanks. (Jerome, I suspect quite a lot of this scenario looks familiar to you!)

Luckily I’m off to France tomorrow morning. I might have bent the truth just a little bit and implied that I was leaving this evening – so I promised that I would be happy to roll up my sleeves and help, but only until 5pm. Result: I seem like a good corporate citizen, I don’t have to put up with an irrational partner, and I don’t have to give up my weekend. Survival of the fittest, baby…

We’re off to visit Aude’s grandfather in Calvados this weekend, although no trip to France would be complete without a stop at the Wine Society to stock up – so we’re going to do the entire tour with a boot full of wine (they’re closed on Sunday, so we’ve got to buy everything on the way out rather than on the way back). I’ll take the camera along, so check back on Monday for the piccies.

Just after I got off the train with Ms Squeaky this morning I watched a bicycle courier get hit by a taxi outside my office. I double-checked my calendar to see if perhaps I was actually out of synch and today was Friday the 13th.

Got into work today to find that someone had stolen “my” desk (okay, we all work on hotdesks and they’re technically first-come-first-serve, but there’s a sort of unspoken rule that you don’t nick someone else’s desk if they generally sit there day-in, day-out). So not a good start.

Needed to have a client presentation ready for this afternoon, but my new secretary is still learning the ropes. Handed over the presentation for printing and binding — but didn’t realise that I needed to give her more explicit instructions than that. Fast-forward to an hour before the presentation: total pile of crap comes back from our graphics department (honestly, how hard can it be to print and bind ten copies of a presentation?). Sent a junior consultant off in a frenzy to put right what a secretary couldn’t. Kaizen, my ass. This was just-in-time production at it’s finest.

It was all alright on the night, though. The client came in, rolled over and let us scratch his belly. We gave him exactly what he wanted to hear and it looks highly likely that we’ll get the piece of work that we were bidding for. We saw his back leg jiggling — you know, the way it does when you scratch…just…the..right…spot!

So, for me, it was a pretty good day. Despite the fact that it was clearly a shit day for everyone around me.

And it ended where it started. Jumping on the 18:34 train to Dover Priory, I took my seat and started checking my e-mail. Mr. Self-Important-Banker (*not his real name, I suspect) got onto the train boasting a Bluetooth headset and an attitude. About three minutes into his “Buy! Buy! Sell! Sell!” call, he got the same mobile phone treatment as Ms Squeaky this morning.

Morale of this story: hell hath no wrath like a commuter annoyed.

Anyone who has ever travelled on the Tube will know that the British famously travel in silence. Never mind the fact that the Tube train is absolutely full, you’d be able to hear a pin drop over the soft rustle of the newspapers and hushed shuffling of feet.

Travelling on the train is much the same – the vast majority of people on the train are regular commuters, reading their newspapers, working on documents, or checking their e-mail on their Blackberries. Those who travel together may chat quietly, but they’re always aware of those around them. Occasionally mobile phones ring, met with a roll of the eyes from other passengers, but generally callers have moved beyond shouting “I’M ON THE TRAIN…THE TRAIN!” and keep their conversations quiet and short.

I say “generally” because there’s always an exception to every rule. Avid readers of my blog will have already been introduced to Ms Squeaky, the woman who loves to chat on her mobile phone for the entire commute each day. For those who are interested, it appears that she’s now back with her boyfriend, though they’re on shaky ground. But that’s not important – what’s important is that this woman breaks the unspoken rules of silent travel, day after day.

An Englishman is characterised by his endless patience and his stiff upper lip. He’s raised on a lifetime of “mustn’t grumble” and silently and stoically endures the worst that life throws at him.

But every man, even an Englishman, has his breaking point. And when one of his inviolable rules has been broken, he lashes out.

And so it was on my train this morning.

The tension has been building up for several days. One passenger has been exchanging frustrated glances with another. Comments muttered under one’s breath. A collective sigh of relief as we all stepped off the train.

This morning, though, one of our number snapped. After Ms Squeaky made her third phone call of the morning, the gent sitting next to her pointed out just how inconsiderate her phoning was. This was met with cheers from the other passengers. Backed into a corner, Ms Squeaky became defensive and proceeded to assert her “rights” to telephone, and began to call our chap all manner of colourful names. She threatened to make a complaint to the railways authority. She demanded that he stop taking her seat on the train. And she demanded that he stop taking the train all together, as he was too annoying to bear.

It all got ugly very quickly.

I, on the other hand, reverted to that other stalwart of Englishness. I spent the next 40 minutes studying a Powerpoint slide and avoiding eye contact with anyone else.

I’m no fool. The safest place in any battle is beneath the parapet!