I only came to know of my blunder when I reached office this morning, read through 432 very confusing emails and then slowly saw each guy in the office check his phone and then get up to look at me. That was when I checked my own voicemail.

And almost threw up.

I knew immediately that the Einstein game was up. I’d blown it and every single person in Dufresne knew. I’d even bitched about one of our biggest clients IN THE WORLD. Before waiting for any of the partners to call me and slap me across the face I quickly packed up, switched off my phone and left the office. I spent seven hours sitting at Bandra Bandstand wondering about the various alternative careers I had in front of me now that 12,342 people in the consulting business knew without a doubt that I was a drunken fool.

I had dinner at some café, came home a few minutes ago and locked myself in my room. As far as I am concerned my only hope now is to work for a public sector company or take the IAS exams. The private sector would never hire me for a job that paid twelve lakh per annum excluding bonus. Not with that voicemail on my HR file and this shameful suicidal departure from Dufresne.

I don’t want to speak to anyone. Not even Gouri. This time I’ve screwed it up all for sure. And to think that I was so close to making associate.

Fuck.

Good night.

7 January 2007

8.15 a.m.

More details later. But Robin Einstein Varghese is being talked about on CNBC. Crap.

2.23 p.m.

Prasad has sent a car for me. The driver said that if I didn’t go immediately Dufresne would file a police complaint.

10.23 p.m.

THE TABLES HAVE TURNED!

No time to chat. I have a live radio interview at 10.30. More maybe tomorrow.

8 January 2007

11.54 p.m.

You will not believe the previous forty-eight hours. No, seriously, you will not BELIEVE the events of the past forty-eight hours.

There I was, sleeping the deep sleep of the hopeless, beaten and broken yesterday morning when Jignesh woke me up and told me that they were talking about Dufresne on CNBC. I rushed to the living room and turned up the volume only to hear the anchors on CNBC laughing away while a recording of my voicemail played in the background.

Apparently the TV channel had received the voice recording in an unmarked package late last evening. Overnight, it had become something of an Internet phenomenon. All over the web people were embedding the audio into blogs and websites. And it had become the laughing stock of the corporate world.

The anchors played it over and over again, pausing only briefly in between once to say that the Sensex had gone up 8 per cent. They wondered who the voice belonged to and what Dufresne and Lederman were going to do now that every management consultant and banker in the world had, or would soon, hear it on the net or on TV. In between a stupid reporter informed that the recording was available for download from the CNBC website.