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.
