The Things I Love About Consulting

You are told by your client that you have to coordinate a part of your work with the Fantastic Name Department. So, you call someone in the FND only to find:
- They don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!
- They had an idea for something but were really waiting for you the consultant to finish your work for them to use as a template
- They don’t know who’s in charge or who can help you so you get ping-ponged from email to email or phone to phone for weeks
- They’re not done with their part, and yours is due on Tuesday, but that's okay - they’ll maybe have something done in late February (in most cases, I make the client pay an upgrade fee, but a few clients shitbricks on that)

You want to have private meetings with client employees, so they set you up in:
- A hallway with no phone (“Don’t you have a cell phone?”)
- The cafeteria
- A glassed –in office with no blinds on the windows
- A local Starbucks (sadly, this is true)
- My favorite – the boss’s office while he’s just “hanging around somewhere else…”

You ask for a room with computer, projection, and flipcharts, and they give you:
- An overhead projector and a box of flimsies to run black & white slides of your presentation (Do you know where a computer, a printer, or a copier are? NO!)
- A large roll of butcher paper and some tape to make your own flip chart paper on the wall like a home DIY project or a kindergarten art project!
- A computer with a 17-inch monitor (“Isn’t that big enough?”)
- “Don’t you have a personal laptop you can use???”

You are called in to mediate a termination, and you find:
- The person may be violent
- There is no paperwork whatsoever on past grievances
- The boss really wants a reason to fire the person (usually because they have such a bad attitude) and they want you to find one
- They don’t tell you the employee’s entire family died in a freak popcorn accident last Tuesday
- The boss is really the one who should be fired (Had one of those today; this lady should have never been given the power to supervise others)

The client employees start to get to know you, so they:
- Pull you aside every time you visit to tell you horribel things about their boss
- Ask you to help them update their resumes or cover letters free of charge (on their company’s time – the company that they are trying to interview out of, the same company that pays you. This is usually followed by a fascinating conversation about ethics and what a consultant does when a company pays him to "help employees" - meaning "NOT help employees out the door on the company's dime.")
- Put you on their email list where they send out chain mail about cancerous puppies or free bags of M&Ms or how God has blessed them
- Try to see if you can help their kid get a job somewhere else (God, this happens A LOT!)