So today was another terrible day. I got totally gored by a client. Which I knew would happen. These guys are generally pretty cool, and the CFO and I have a pretty jokey relationship but the CEO can be a real prick to deal with and he only wants to talk to the partners so even though the senior partner doesn't have a CLUE what's going on and if the client knew the idiotic questions this partner asks me during the conference calls he'd think twice about the $475/hour rate. One of these days the partner is going to think he's pressing the mute button on the speakerphone and his finger's going to slip and the client will get an earful.

(My buddy who's an investment banker says you can completely tell when someone on a conference call has hit the mute button and is talking shit about you during a call. There's something about the silence that's just too quiet. I think it depends on the kind of phones you use. Sometimes I think I can hear it -- a little variation in the static background noise -- but I'm not sure. Guess I'm just not on enough conference calls. Seems like I'm on them all the damn time.)

So this partner, besides having this thing for the mute button on the speakerphone, spends these calls either asking me questions I already gave him the answers to, or saying something to the client that's just wrong, and I need to make faces at him and correct, or he's not paying any attention at all and surfing the ESPN site or shopping for golf clubs while he's listening with about 1/10th of a brain. Anyway. It makes me crazy sometimes. I'm not there yet and so I got reamed, and the partner stood by (although he sort of placated the client in the end). I did make a pretty big mistake, with a UCC filing slip up. We've got enough leverage with the debtor that I don't think it will turn out to be a huge deal but, you know, it's something like $75K which is enough to piss off the client. (They got the numbers mixed up in the call and were thinking it was closer to $60K, which I didn't chime in to correct.)

So the scary part of the day was I was just totally panicked about how many OTHER securities filings for other clients might have lapsed. Crappity crap crap. I'm going to work on it some tonight and then I think I'll see if my paralegal can do some more checking up to cover my ass tomorrow.
- posted by Blogger @ 5:15 PM