Feels Like the Old Days, redux: The Camaraderie is Key

Yesterday I blogged "Feels Like the Old Days" describing how spending several hours on Tuesday meeting f2f with a client then hanging out with my sales colleague for drinks and dinner felt like 'old times' again. On Wednesday I had another face-to-face meeting with a client, a different client, for which I met two colleagues who'd traveled in from out of town. But while that meeting had some similarities with Tuesday's in that people traveled to meet together, it was not the same.

What was missing? What was missing was the camaraderie.

Wednesday's meeting was transactional. My colleagues flew in for the meeting and flew out afterwards. We did chat outside the building both before and after the meeting, but those were a) short chats and b) focused almost entirely on the situation with the client. There was very little that was off the straight-and-narrow of the business immediately at hand.

And that's the difference. That's the difference between what working in enterprise sales was like in the "old days"— which, keep in mind, were as recent as 10-15 years ago— and today.

In the old days we spent time together as a team. We had unstructured hours together that we filled with everything from chat about work, to families, to life in general. We really got to know each other as people.

That's a big thing we've lost in the shift to working remotely. Today we just assemble a team to do a task, do the task, then go back to our separate jobs and lives. There's no camaraderie. And that camaraderie was the key.

Beter Call Saul 6.07: Howard's End

In episode 6.07 of Better Call Saul we see the conclusion of Howard Hamlin's story. ...Well, kind of.

Kim and Jimmy have been running a con to discredit Howard to speed up settlement of a case. It's an elaborate con, more elaborate than anything Jimmy seems to have done in the past. And that's because Kim has sunk her teeth into it and assisted with the planning. The two even have created an elaborate "storyboard" of the plot, hidden on the back side of a large framed picture in Kim's living room. Ep. 6.07 is when "D-Day", as they call it, arrives.

The final stroke of the plot is discrediting Howard in front of all of his legal peers who are negotiating a settlement on the Sandpiper case— the class action suit about a chain of nursing homes overcharging elderly residents. Jimmy and Kim have phonied up a set of photographs that supposedly show the mediator assigned to the case, a respected retired judge, accepting a clandestine payoff from Jimmy. The staged photos are given to Howard by a private investigator he's hired to investigate Jimmy.



Unbeknown to Howard, the PI is part of the con. Not only did Howard see staged photos of an actor dressed as the judge taking the payoff, the PI furtively swapped the photos after showing them to Howard. Thus when Howard makes a big scene of challenging the judge during the mediation, announcing he's got photographic evidence to prove he's in an illicit bribery scheme with Jimmy, the photos he triumphantly shows everyone depict a man in exercise clothes who sorta looks like the judge taking a frisbee from Jimmy.

To make this con even more embarrassing to Howard, Jimmy dabbed a contact drug on the original photos that contains something akin to a heavy dose of caffeine. Howard is sweating, agitated, and has dilated pupils as he frantically waves the supposed evidence around. This builds on the innuendo campaign Jimmy has been running for weeks that Howard is using cocaine. The other lawyers in the room, who've all heard the innuendo up to this point but were willing to dismiss it as smear campaign by Jimmy, believe it.

Howard's credibility is destroyed. His most senior co-counsel, Cliff Main of the highly respected firm Davis & Main, is sympathetic— he's revealed to Howard that his son struggled with drug addiction, so he understands a bit of the difficulty— but walks him out of the room and tells him he's done. Cliff also apologizes to the retired judge. The opposing lead counsel, Rich Schweikart of Schweikart & Cokeley, rescinds his latest settlement offer and drops back to a previous offer that's lower by a few million dollars. Furthermore, he says he'll reduce his offer by another $1 million each day they wait. Cliff quietly accepts it on Howard's behalf as Howard is still panting and sputtering in his office, ranting about how it's all Jimmy's chicanery. Nobody believes him.

Leaving for Italy Tomorrow and I Haven't Packed

I'm leaving for Italy in... [glances at clock]... 15 hours and I haven't packed. Why am I spending a few minutes to blog about that here instead of, like, actually packing? Sigh. It's because I'm struggling with motivation right now. And no, the fact that I'm going to Italy for the first time ever isn't enough to motivate me.

What's demotivating me? Going on this trip is tied up with my frustrations about my job. Because this trip, though it's a vacation, is a work-sponsored vacation trip. And I had fresh frustrations in a long afternoon at work today.

For the moment I'm just relaxing to see if I can get over my motivation gap naturally. I don't need to panic about getting ready. I remind myself of three things about this trip: One, I've traveled a bazillion times before. I know I can pack a bag quickly. Two, this trip is only a week— well, 8.5 days. It's not like I'm packing for a month. Three, I only need to pack one style of clothes. It's a beach/warm weather/tourist trip. I'll back mostly beach-y clothes, a few changes of European-street-casual clothes, and a light sweater for cool evenings. It's not like I have to pack all that and a couple of two-piece suits. Or a tuxedo. (There's no high-stakes, James Bond-esuqe Casino Royale action planned on this trip.)