Prove me wrong

Boy have I enjoyed the last three days!  Since getting back from New York on Friday night, I have:

• Eaten barbecue and Japanese with friends (at different restaurants, on different nights)
• Gone to ballet, Crossfit, spin and yoga classes, plus one weight-training session with my trainer
• Attended church, taught Primary kids how to sing in a round, and completed tithing settlement with the Bishop
• Paid my rent and utility bills
• Finally managed to get UPS to deliver my bicycle at a time when I was home to sign for it
• Gotten a haircut
• Cleaned my apartment and bought fresh flowers for the bathroom
• Purchased healthy groceries and eaten a balanced diet
• Given up reading the newspaper because everytime I do I end up bawling about what happened in Connecticut
• Gotten caught up on missed episodes of my favorite TV shows
• Slept for more than 4 hours in a row
• Bought plane tickets to Colorado and Utah for Christmas, and planned fun things to do in Denver with Amanda and in Salt Lake with college/mission friends
• Gone to two Christmas parties and, sadly, missed a third
• Spent Sunday afternoon and all day today working to catch up on all my other projects that got sidelined during the past two weeks
• Opened two pre-Christmas presents from my parents (Thank you!)
• Caught black lung disease and/or a cold 

But we aren't out of the woods yet, my friends.  Although it has been radio silence from our client since Friday, the LA Times ran a story today indicating that things had progressed.  And then this evening I got a message from the partner on the deal:  Pack a bag and be ready to go to New York tomorrow.   

It isn't certain yet that we'll need to go, but it's possible that by this time tomorrow night we'll be sitting once more in the DPW conference room.  I'm not thrilled, but part of me says better now than this weekend or next week, when I want to be on vacation with friends and family!  Let's get 'er done!

My response to the partner:  Okay, but I'm packing for the train, not the plane. 

Because whatever happens, I have no intention of getting stuck in the position I was in during the first trip, with not enough clothes, crappy toiletries, no running clothes or music, or even fingernail clippers.  So I'm packing enough clothes, accessories and deices to get me through the end of the week and beyond -- not because I want to be stuck in negotiations over Christmas, but because I may not have time to go home and repack before flying out to Denver and Utah.

And, dammit, if the client or the other lawyers give me grief for overpacking, I already know what I'm going to say:  Prove me wrong!

This isn't even all of it



The trick, this time, is to avoid repeating the ties I wore during the first trip. 
I think I should be able to do it. 
The bow-ties will be fun to throw into the mix, especially after the
fratty guys made fun of the other side's lawyer
 for wearing a cardigan that I thought was awesome.

I could get so much more in here if I wanted to . . .

 

Bouquet

There's nothing like fresh-cut flowers to make getting ready in the morning a joy.  My favorites are star-gazer lilies -- it's basically impossible to have too many!

With star-gazers in the bathroom, my whole apartment
smells like a florist's shop.

There's no place like home!

I'm back!  At long last, I'm home! 

After last night's walk-out, we were all in suspense as to what would happen next.  We got an email around 3:45am from our lead negotiators saying that they had just left off discussions with the other side and that they would be in touch with further word.  Later that morning we got word that we should hang around until after noon to see if things were going to heat up (but the subtext was that it seemed likely that we'd be able to go home).  So I called housekeeping to expedite my latest load of laundry, packed my things and checked out of the hotel.  Never have I been so happy to check out of a hotel! 

The next couple of hours were a mix of gleeful anticipation of going home, trepidation at the possibility of having to resume negotiations, and ineffective attempts at getting other work done.  At 2pm the call came:  I was officially released to go home! [cue Hallelujah chorus]  I immediately called my secretary and had her book me a spot on the next high-speed train to DC; within the hour I was on my way. 

The trip was uneventful and this evening wonderful.  I went straight from the train station to meet up with friends for drinks and dinner, and then went home to unpack, cut my fingernails, deep-clean everything in my apartment (oh, sweet therapy!) and sort through the shambles of my domestic situation (my mailbox was full of bills; my door had a notice from the landlord pasted to it warning me that if I didn't pay my rent by Monday they would terminate my lease and evict me -- nevermind that they don't accept any other form of payment than personal check and no one under 80 takes a checkbook with them on surprise business trips to New York). 

Now, at the insanely early hour of sometime before midnight, I'm finally starting to feel grounded again.  Time for a snack and bed.  I can't wait for tomorrow to start:  Ballet class, haircut, travel planning, Christmas parties -- so many wonderful, ordinary, non-work activities await!

P.S.  In the category of "see, the grass isn't greener", I'm happy to report that this trip has effectively cured me of any regret I might have felt for moving away from New York.  As I spoke with other lawyers on the deal during the past two weeks, I learned that this intense, around-the-clock working style wasn't at all unusual for them; indeed, many of them seemed to thrive on pulling all-nighters.  If that's what life as a New York lawyer is like, I don't want anything to do with it.  In addition, the trip dispelled any fantasies I might have entertained about the glamor of a travel-heavy worklife.  I admit, in the past, to having eyed with some jealousy folks who spend their professional lives flying to exotic lands.  But if that means losing touch with everything at home, having no routine or sense of community, and losing all sense of groundedness, then that's a glamor I can live without.  I'll stick with my little life of bikes and goldfish and seasons tickets to the Kennedy Center.

Because who doesn't pack thirteen ties for a two-day trip?

Dad sent a text this afternoon asking if I was trying to break a world record for the longest time living on two days' worth of clothing.  The answer is yes -- if not a world record, then at least a personal record.   

But let's be clear about one thing:  I may have spent the last two weeks alternating between two changes of clothes and sending daily loads of laundry to the hotel cleaners, but it wasn't until today that I had to repeat a tie.   

Pack up your toys and go home

Oh man, I love the theatrics of negotiations. 

After two weeks of pitched battle, we're down to the wire on this deal -- the documents are getting hammered out, there's only a handful of outstanding, big-ticket items left to be resolved, the negotiations are ferocious.  I had just finished turning another draft of the main contract and was about to send it out for review when suddenly our lead negotiator burst into the room and told everyone to go home.  The other side had refused to budge on one of her key issues; it was time to send a message.  Specifically: Give me what I want or find someone else to play with.

Twenty minutes later, we were gone. 

It's all a game, of course, albeit one with billions of dollars at stake.  Who's going to cave first?  Who knows.  Walk-outs are a gutsy negotiating move that can cut both ways.  Could be that the other side will be sufficiently thrown off by our walk-out that they'll concede the points we care about.  Could also be that our negotiators have misjudged the other side and have just exploded the deal.  Either way, it'll be fun to see how it plays out overnight and tomorrow morning.

Early release

In any right state of the world I should not get home from work at 2:00am and think, "Wow, it's so early!  What am I going to do with the rest of the day?"  But each of us must live the life we have, and that's where I am -- so I'll take it.  After a week and a half of getting home closer to 4am or 5am, leaving at 2am feels like a half day.  If this continues, I might mistake myself for being on vacation.

At long last, the log-jam started to break in the negotiations today.  Rather than turning (and returning) heavy, labor-intensive drafts of the transaction documents in which each side simply rejected the other side's proposal and reiterated its own former positions -- which is what we've been doing -- we've finally to the point where we're making targeted revisions to specific provisions; exhibits and attachments are coming together; the business people are anxious to get things done.  Anxious enough to realize that if they kept driving their lawyers to the brink of exhaustion, it might actually slow things down instead of moving things along.  So instead of calling it a night and leaving the lawyers with a list of "to dos" (as they've been doing), tonight they said that everyone (including lawyers) could go home early (2am!) and get some sleep in preparation for the (hopefully) final slog toward signing this thing up. 

If all goes well (and there's no reason to think it will, given the track record, but I'll maintain some nominal hope in the interest of not being a Grinch), we'll be done with the deal sometime in the wee hours Friday morning.

 

Snorting milk at 4:00am

Okay, so the great thing about working from 8:30am-4:00am is that, by the time you get back to your hotel, you are STARVING (like, Donner Party starving) and completely slap-happy -- so you feel zero qualms about settling down with a $25 box (well, boxes) of cold cereal from room service to read a few funny blog posts before going to sleep.  Only you have to be really careful to coordinate your reading and your eating, because if you accidentally read blog posts like this one or this one in the middle of a bite, you could very well end up snorting skim milk and low-fat raisins out of your nose.

Because of course a $25 bowl of cold cereal doesn't come with anything to drink.

Livin' the dream

It has been nine days since I flew to New York on a last-minute trip for an urgent client matter with a suitcase packed for two nights.  In the seven days that followed, I billed 115 hours, including two consecutive days of over 20 billable hours each and only four hours in between.  That means that in two days I worked the equivalent of a normal person's entire workweek, and in one week the equivalent of nearly three such workweeks.  In the last two days I have worked an additional 30 hours, bringing the overall total to over 140 billable hours since this trip began.  This is the most I have ever worked in such a short period of time.

How do I feel?  Weird.  It's surreal how time passes when you're in a conference room for that many hours in a row.  I'm tired.  I feel physically icky due to poor diet and irregular mealtimes.  I'm on edge with the febrile energy of the mentally overstimulated and physically sedentary.  My hair is too long (I'm practically Rapunzel by now) and I'm sick of wearing the two outfits I brought.  I regret missing the play tonight. 

But mostly I feel lonely.  I spend day and night in a conference room full of people, but, aside from my colleagues, they're people I don't know and with whom I have no relationship beyond this deal.  As for my two colleagues, our relationship is still very professional -- we're here to work, not play or socialize, and though some socializing occurs in the margins, it's not much or particularly meaningful.  So I surface from time to time and see that the days have rolled by without me -- past Christmas parties and dance classes and church meetings and dinner groups with friends at restaurants where I want to eat and Sunday afternoons when I normally would call family and friends -- past all those things that make me feel connected and appreciated and not irrelevant or invisible.

Things could be worse (I could have black lung disease, for example, or a wonky eye, or be stuck in Lafayette, Indiana, instead of New York) and I'm grateful that they're not.  I also appreciate this chance to see inside a crazy and chaotic negotiation and work with, and learn from, two very smart and skilled colleagues.  But still.  The party is over and I want to go home.

Oh the irony

How many times have I sat in Washington, DC, looking at the New York theatre offerings and wishing I were there so that I could see a play?  Lots.  And now here I am sitting in New York, wishing I was in DC so I could see Theatre de l'Atelier's production of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses.  Of all the plays this season in DC, there are two that I really wanted to see -- this is one of them -- but as of now there's basically a zero percent chance that I'll see it.  I had a ticket for last night's performance; I moved it to tonight.  This morning, when it was clear that I wasn't going to be able to go home, I exchanged the ticket for tomorrow night's performance; but still there's no sign of my being able to leave anytime soon.  No doubt by this time tomorrow night I'll still be in a conference room at Davis Polk either working away madly or -- quite as possibly -- sitting around in my hotel room while everyone at the client is taking a break with their families or friends. 

That's kind of what happened tonight.  We worked all day to get a set of documents ready for a discussion with the client tonight.  The documents were ready on schedule, only the client canceled the meeting -- everyone had other plans and were happy enough with where things stood -- we could go home.  For the first time in a week I found myself free at 9:30pm with nothing to do.  It was too late to see a play or opera; I didn't want to sit around the hotel, so I went for a walk to see the pretty display windows at Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany on Fifth Avenue.  


Every year Bergdorf does fantastical life-sized holiday windows.
This year's theme is the Follies

This was my favorite -- an aerial view of an all-woman jazz band

A giant crystal star hanging above an intersection surrounded by the top jewelers in the city

Giant jewelly snakes on the Bulgari store front

Tiffany has tiny, jewel-box-like windows;
these evoked elegant interiors

 

 

Now I'm back at the hotel watching an upsetting and increasingly frightening Joan Crawford movie that appears to be a 1950s effort at grappling with issues of loneliness and the need for love and affection, age differences in a relationship (where the woman is significantly older than the man) and mental illness (both the challenge of the illness itself and the stigma and limitations of psychiatric treatment).  We'll see how long I last before I fall asleep.

If it isn't one thing, it'll be another . . .

So I come home (and by "home" I mean my hotel room) after work today and walk into a cloud of cigarette smoke.  Sickening cigarette smoke permeating the room, pouring out of the ceiling vent.  Instantly I had a headache and hated whoever was smoking on the other side of the vent. 

For about five minutes I resolved to just push ahead and go to bed -- after all, it was only 12:45am, practically the middle of the afternoon, and I wanted to get a head-start on my beauty sleep.  But the smell didn't relent and my headache worsened, so I called the manager, who, in a dazzling fit of helpfulness reminded me that this is a non-smoking hotel (oh really? someone may have missed the memo), sent a security guard to confirm the smoke ("yep, I can smell it too"), and then offered to have housekeeping come "spray something to freshen up the room".  Well, last I checked, "spraying something" wasn't going to do anything to stop more smoke from coming into the room; at most, it would just add more fumes to aggravate my already aching head.  So I proposed that he put me in a new room and send someone to move my things because there's no reason to be staying at a JW Marriott and tolerate a cigarette-smoke-filled nap at the end of a 90+ hour workweek. 

Now here I am, an hour later, settling into my fresh new room, stuffing the pillow-chocolates into my pockets in preparation for tomorrow, and getting ready for bed.  It's annoying to have lost that hour of sleep but so much more pleasant to breathe clean air than smoke.  Plus, meetings don't start until 10am tomorrow, so I'll actually be able to get some sleep.

Oh, and whatever positive energy (and/or SWAT teams) you can send my way would be much appreciated -- there's talk of pushing back the Friday deadline and working through the weekend.  I really, REALLY want to go home for at least a little while this weekend.  Just give me Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning at home and I'll be happy to come back up here and keep plugging away.

Glory be

We got the message late last night that the client's business team would be meeting with senior management in the morning to discuss key terms of the deal.  This meant two things for the lawyers:  First, it meant that we suddenly had a pile of new work to do in preparation for those early meetings -- because naturally the business folks wanted to present something coherent and useful to their bosses, and the task of creating those documents fell to the lawyers.  Sigh.  Second, it meant that there would be little for the lawyers to do during the morning hours while the business team was in meetings -- and for the first time since we got here Saturday morning, they decided that it was okay for us to stay at the hotel and sleep rather than sit in the conference room and wait for them.  YAY!

So I slept like a dead person for eight hours straight.  Then got up, ate a pillow chocolate because I was starving, got dressed for the day and had brunch at Le Pain Quotidien across the street.  Now, feeling like a civilized human being again, I'm heading back over to the war rooms for the next round of adventure. 

It sure does feel good to have had a break!  The key now will be to keep this thing moving enough during the next two days to permit us to go back home to DC for at least part of the weekend...

Think of these as my hotel-dwelling emergency food storage.

Quiche lorraine with lentil soup and lemonade

 

And another

Let's see, I think the hours were 6am until about 1:15am.  I can't wait to tally my billables this week; I'm confident I'll easily break my current record of 86 hours worked in a week.

Today was better than yesterday, in the sense that we were super busy all day -- no sense of twiddling my thumbs.  It was also harder because of the cumulative fatigue.  The whole day was an exercise in not curling up to take a nap on the floor. 

The weird thing is that the business team of the client seems (for the most part) to be loving this.  Think slumber party on steroids -- like, $7 billion worth of steroids.

Another day at the grindstone

We've finished the fourth full day of no-holds-barred negotiations and I sense the honeymoon phase is ending.  Overall I'm still enjoying the experience -- it's different from any other deal I've worked on; it's quite an adventure -- but the pace is starting to wear.  I'm tired of being stuck with only one suit and two shirts, needing a haircut (I was supposed to have it cut on Saturday), and not being able to exercise or eat properly (sitting for sixteen hours at a time with nothing to eat but cookies, honeydew and Diet Coke is not a recipe for health and happiness). 

Mostly I'm just tired.  Today was better than yesterday in the sense that it was a 9am-to-2am workday.  But worse in the sense that most of those hours were wasted through inefficient project-management by the client.  Plus, although I'm getting to bed three hours earlier than I did last night, I also have to be back in the conference room three hours earlier tomorrow morning:  The first meeting kicks off at 6am. 

So, without further ado, I'm going to bed.

But first let me just say that I have a growing horror of a baby-faced little man on the client's in-house legal team whose nose is the only thing in his face that moves when he speaks.  Makes me think of a cross between an expressionless twelve-year-old and a gerbil.

A 9 to 5 job

I just worked a 9 to 5 day. Note that both times were "A.M." (Technically I should say 7 to 5, since I put in a couple if hours at the hotel before the first meeting.) Everything starts again at 9 tomorrow, er, this morning, so I'm off to bed.

New York - A sudden change in plans

At 5:20am I received the following email:  "We're a go.  See you at the airport."  In just over an hour, I was showered, packed and en route to the airport, simultaneously directing the cabbie and leaving messages to cancel my haircut and let Amy know that I wouldn't make it to ballet class.  By 9:30am I was in New York City, sitting in a conference room in one of the major New York law firms. 

Depending on how the next few days go, I'll write more about what I actually did in that conference room later.  For now, you can just click here for some context.

By the time we hit 6:30pm, everyone else in the room was too exhausted to think straight (they were going on 30 hours without sleep), so we adjourned for the day.  My colleagues and I checked into our hotel; we all agreed it was time for dinner and that I should be in charge.  Because that is always the right answer.

By this time it was late enough that most of the best places were already booked for the night.  But I managed to find a Japanese restaurant called Sugiyama that was listed in the Michelin Guide and scored highly in every other food review I found, and which happened to have room for three at 8:15pm.  Did I want to make a reservation?  Yes, please. 

The place is charming and tiny and reminded me very much of Soji down in the Village and Azabu in Paris.  As any civilized restaurant should do, Sugiyama cabined our menu selection to a few pre-fixe dinners.  The others didn't feel strongly, so I ordered the 8-course dinner for all three of us.  Three hours and ten courses later, we stumbled home happy and full and delighted with the delicacies we had enjoyed.

Sakizuke -- tofu appetizer

Zensai -- delicate arrangement of seasonal Japanese fish and vegetable
(I ate that ENTIRE CRAB in one bite. Possibly the bravest thing I've done.)



Takuri -- assorted sashimi
(one of the best overall selections of sashimi I've had)

Suimono -- seasonal clear soup



Ishiyaki -- tenderloin cooked on a hot stone
with mushrooms, a pepper, and garlic chips

Oshinogi -- oshisushi
(The tofu on the left was delicious;
as was the persimmon stuffed with jelly-fish, cucumbers and sesame cream)



I can't remember this one, and it's not on the online menu

 

Sticky rice with vegetables wrapped in a leaf
with miso soup and pickles

Grapefruit wine jelly with cream
(a definite highlight of the evening)