Chapter 1 - The Initial Encounter
Fucking hell what a mess!
I can't believe I'd been so stupid. I was now consigned to sleeping on the sofa until I manage to patch things up with my Wife. Thinking back, I wish I'd done things a little differently. But that is Vegas for you.
Vegas. The adult playground. That's exactly what I'd done. Played.
Perhaps a little bit of background would help clear things up. My name is Mike. I'm sort of a business trouble-shooter for want of a better term. Essentially, my company will get approached to look at a company and its core processes. And that is where I come in. I'll pretty much just snoop around for a week or three and get a feel of how things are (or aren't) running.
Once I've got a reasonable feel for the place, I'll meet with the board and recommend some pretty basic changes. Normally this stuff just seems like common sense to me, but for some reason the plebs who work there just aren't capable of seeing the wood for the trees.
Give things another week or two to settle down, then I go home a happy man. My firm gets a nice big payout (of which, I probably only see about 25%) and the aforementioned company probably reverts back to the way they used to do things in the first place.
Now, I was out consulting at a small firm in Vegas, but managed to get a little bit of down-time to myself. Also, for once, I wasn't compelled to go out to dinner or for drinks with any of the local management as they all seemed to be of the non-drinking persuasion.
What the fuck is the point in not drinking? I'm originally from England, and for us, drinking is pretty much our national sport. It used to be rugby, which is sort of like your American Football only less wimpy. The problem is that we started getting our collective arses kicked by the Springboks (South Africa), Wallabies (Australia) and the All-Blacks (New Zealand). But drinking is something we will always be world champions at.
That said, I've gotten into a shit-load of trouble when I'm bladdered. For instance, I'm currently on some sort of FAA no-fly-list thanks to a ton of duty-free booze that I drank on my last flight over the Atlantic. In fact, that was my last flight for the rest of my life it seems. To be honest, I don't really remember what happened, other than I spent the next 3 months in prison up on some half-arsed Air-rage charge.
So now I drive everywhere... But I digress....