Dominic asked me if I was proposing that Dufresne bribe the CEO of Lederman.

For a moment I said nothing. Secretly I was hoping that someone else would chip in. There was pin-drop silence once again. Everyone was waiting for me to explain. I took a deep breath, reached for all the courage and Robingenuity I had inside me, and then cut the phone.

After a few minutes when I had my logic worked out completely I called back. After apologizing profusely for the sudden unexplained line drop, I told everyone my logic.

What if Tom would allow us to carry out the project in peace? Dufresne would be able to do a good job and transfer significant value to Lederman’s potential pool. What would that do? That would help Lederman to become leaner, operate better, make more money and generate greater financial and socio-environmental profits. What would happen then? The board of the bank would reward Tom financially in the form of bonuses and perks.

All I was suggesting, I told everyone, was that we short-circuit this process by pre-forwarding the monetary amortization due to Tom in order to apply strategic pro-Lederman leverage.

Dominic said that he would rather lose this project and all other projects and see Dufresne go bankrupt before he would ever authorize a bribe to save a project. He told me I should be ashamed of myself for even suggesting something like this.

Someone chuckling softly somewhere on one of the lines.

And then he told me to talk to him first thing tomorrow morning. The others were given 12 hours to think of ways to meet Tom’s demands.

Diary why do so many bad things happen to essentially good, hard-working, problem-solvers like me?

The project is over. Dominic hates me. The project team thinks I am a joke. Everything is conspiring against me. Everything. Wax statues, wireless microphones, Tom Pastrami, Dominic … everyone.

Even this Mohra movie. Bloody I’ve been downloading it for three days now.

What the fuck.

I could use a little Raveena today.

11.45 p.m.

Nonsense. Fucking bastard hotel manager.

I called the reception innocently to ask how long it usually took, hypothetically speaking, to download large files of movie-length on the serviced apartment’s WiFi connection.

Fucker got all worked up and started telling me that piracy was a serious crime in the UK and it was illegal to download any such thing on the WiFi connection. This even after I told him that I was asking this purely from a hypothetical perspective.

Stupid fellow then wants to know what my hypothesis is. I had to think of something spontaneously, which is in any case what I need to on a daily basis at work and with Gouri.