A Week in the Life of a Consultant

• Monday-Wednesday have been fairly difficult work days, as our team has been hard at work preparing for a meeting between our sexy client’s CEO and his top lieutenants — not the easiest way to start up work again after a week abroad in Japan.
• Today was much more laid back. We had an excellent team lunch (great sushi from a local place which I will definitely visit again), made even more excellent by the fact that the firm paid for it. Just before that, I had a pleasant chat with my last manager about my case-end performance review. To maintain work-life balance (Monday was the birthday of my teammate’s wife — which he had to miss because he was in the office until midnight), we were told to leave at 5 PM — an order I very happily carried out.
• Unfortunately, today was a very rainy day, which means that while it usually takes me 40-50 minutes to get home, it took me TWO HOURS to get home.
• Thankfully, tomorrow is our Community Impact Day, where our entire office will visit local non-profit charitable groups to help out — which is pretty incredible given that the firm is allowing those of us with no direct, immediate client needs to do something good for the community on company time. Following the community day, we are having a office-wide charity auction and trivia challenges and even a charity poker game all to raise money for some very worthwhile causes.

Shakespeare as a Consultant would tell it

Consultants are well-known for their love for putting things in slide form, so how would a consultant render Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” (Hat tip to S. Wang)

The original text:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The consultant version:

from Something Awful:

How slide-umentational!

(Edit: Although E. Suh and Shakespeare Geek both point out that these slides are pretty good — a real consultant would have bullet points all over the place)