There are some women who dress elegantly and look the Red Carpet part when they attend a black tie affair. That is, they fit perfectly into the night. They are beautiful, sexy and, well, perfect.
Others are more at home being trashy, dressing down for the occasion. Their skirts are short, blouses low cut. These are the kind of women who are at home in a local tavern, where every movement is watched with anticipation by all the males, and some of the females present.
Then there are women who, as my Uncle Bill used to say, "looked smart".
He'd take me to the local park at lunchtime when I would visit him at work. While we were together, at least a couple times on the break, he's say "she looks smart" or "she's smart looking."
It wasn't until a party at our house when I was home from college that he explained what he really meant by the term "smart".
"It's not about a woman's brain, I just say smart because that makes everyone believe I am talking about a woman's mind," explained the man. "No, when I say smart it's because the woman looks mighty fine, carries herself well, and gets you hot in the loins. I guess I could say something like she's a looker, but that would get everyone up in arms. So I just say she's smart."
Like the ZZ Top song about a smart dressed man, when my uncle spoke about a women who was smartly dressed it meant she was not only hot but beyond that. She'd have a certain flair and sexiness about her no matter what she was wearing, whether it was a man's shirt, down home jeans or an expensive gown.
Stephanie McCann looked smart.
My uncle's words came to mind the first time the Head Actuary on our business account came into the office. She was pretty, sure, but she wasn't elegant or trashy. Rather, she was a perfect specimen of womanhood, a beautiful woman who looked the part of an executive in her suit.
I didn't have much interaction with her at first, but after a while my boss pawned her off on me. He didn't want to be bothered with all the basic numbers, only that they were right and reported on time. Stephanie's firm worked on a number of our health plans, the pricing of them, and also our pension plans. These were more than a hundred million dollars in cost, expense and value, and as a partner with the firm Stephanie had ultimate responsibility of the numbers being right.
She had made partner the year before, and ours was her first case in that role. She had consulted with several other firms, gradually working up the ladder, so that now, at age 35, she was one of the youngest partners in her firm. Many of us thought she slept her way to the top, but that was unfair as the woman was clearly brilliant. Not just competent, she was an expert with the numbers.
I once saw her stocking tops sneaking out from under her dress, a mistake on her part but a vision that came to me many times late at night when I thought about doing her in all kinds of compromising positions. She was so very beautiful, so very unattainable, so very exciting.
Over the weeks we worked together, part-time really as she was only in the building a few times a month leaving her minions to do much of the heavy lifting, Stephanie came to rely on my advice and instinct. I was able to cut through some of the corporate bullshit, making her job a whole lot easier to do.
We became friends, with her telling me about her husband, her likes and dislikes.
The pretty woman had the world on a string.
That is, until the valuation of our health plan.
Look, mistakes happen. They happen in every job. But when you are in charge of a multimillion dollar account, making an error the kind Stephanie and her team did was career suicide.
I won't bore you with all the details. Hell, it's all mumbo, jumbo math equations and Actuarial tables and life expectancies and...enough.
The point is that late Friday night I heard her crying in the office we loaned her.
The door was closed, but I could hear the whimpers nonetheless.
It was late, nobody else was around, and I had merely stopped back to the office to pick up some items I had inadvertently left behind in my haste to leave.
Knocking at the door, I wondered whether I was intruding. There was silence beyond, then the door opened. Stephanie had a make believe smile on her face but the running mascara belied her attempt to mask things.
"Are you alright, Stephanie?"
The pretty woman looked at me, shaking her head no.
"I'm a good listener."
She mumbled something about me not being able to understand, but reluctantly led me into her office.
We spoke for a while, odds and ends kind of things, before she admitted the problem. She had made a mistake, a huge mistake, on the prior year's work. Not some simple, hide it under the rub, fix it now kind of thing, but a major career ending kind of mistake. The kind of mistake that causes financial reports to be restated, shareholders to revolt, and management aflame.
Apparently she accidentally uncovered the problem and had been working diligently over the last couple weeks to isolate it and make sure it wouldn't happen again. She had interviewed associates, managers with the firm and company executives as well, all in the guise of a simple look back at how things went.
It was serious. She briefed her boss of her concerns. The man went ballistic, knowing that such a mistake would cost the firm its reputation and a significant client, to say nothing of his own humongous annual bonus. He shouted at her to get to the bottom of the mess my the following week, find a weasel way out, and promised that if it was as bad as it could be, she would be sacked in disgrace.
"I'll never get another job, I will lose my license," cried the woman.
I listened, consoled her, and then asked the obvious question. "How could this happen, Stephanie?"
Over the next two hours she explained what she knew. On one hand, the mistake didn't really cost the "real" company dollars. It all had to do with expectancies, projections and variables. But on the other, given the regulatory nature of our industry, it would require a complete restatement of financial results. That restatement would undoubtedly have a negative effect on the stock price, cost the shareholders millions and management their jobs.
There was a lot on the line here.
This was awful. There would be major repercussions. Probably even a guy like me would have his job at risk. It was that serious.
The more we spoke about the problem, the more a gem of an idea came my way. Look, I'm all for corporate governance and protecting the financial statements and all that, but I am also a realist. If it really didn't effect true financial result and was only a figment of the Actuarial world, why couldn't something be worked out.
Having worked with much of the front end data cleansing on the initial project, I had a good idea of the overall scope of things. I might not have a clue of what the numbers really meant, but I did know a thing or two about the numbers. That's what I do as an efficiency expert in IT.
We left the office that night, me telling her everything would work out, with a promise of getting back together the following morning to go over the reports from soup to nuts, attempting to find a way to satisfy the management team and the government.
The solution came to me at 3 a.m., startling me awake. I don't really know if I was dreaming, or if I was laying there thinking of the problem, or what. All I knew was that an idea hit me. That led me to the computer, where I started running illustrations and reports that, by 5 a.m., had the basis of hope.
I fell back to sleep, struggling out of bed at 9. I stumbled into the office at 10 where I found Stephanie poring over documents. She was in a little better shape this morning, not a lot better, but better.
"Good morning, Rob, or should I say good afternoon," was her best attempt at levity. "It's nice to see I can count on you with my ass on the line."
