After around two hours of working I had a good new revised cost estimate for one vice-president, three associates and three analysts. In total it came to around 65,000 pounds per month before revision. I decided to scale it up a respectable three times to get a revised estimate of monthly salary to 195,000 pounds. Over six months this would translate to a little under 400,000 pounds. Which seemed to be a reasonable return from a project that we were going to lose completely.

I was going to email it to Dominic. And then decided that this was too insecure. Several times I have noticed the Lederman IT guys snooping around the office and going through people’s computers. Whenever anybody asks them what they are doing, the bastards say they are upgrading something or doing virus checks. But this is nonsense. Two weeks ago I saw them working on the Chinese Pudding’s laptop when she was away on lunch. After the IT guys left I went to check and noticed they had left it unlocked. So, to make sure that they had not violated her privacy, I quickly checked her desktop, email and some important folders like My Documents, My Pictures and all. There was an anti-virus running and the browser seemed to be fine. But to be doubly sure I took a backup of her folders on my pen drive and made a mental note to tell her to frequently change her passwords.

So I called the Polish secretary and told her to give me some white printer paper so that I could take a printout of the spreadsheet and hand it over to Dominic personally. She came, five minutes later, with a copy of the Financial Times. I thanked her profusely and, after she left, I threw the paper out of the window screaming many many abuses in Malayalam. After five minutes she came and gave me a copy of the Economist. It is an expensive magazine so I brought it to the apartment with me.

UN-FREAKING-BELIEVABLE. That woman is so dumb.

After forty minutes of searching pointlessly for the stationery cupboard I ended up stealing paper from the copier, took printouts from the printer in the conference room and gave it to Dominic. Apparently he has already had a word with his friend in HR at Dufresne’s London office. We should be getting confirmation of the necessary arrangements latest by tomorrow morning.

While everything seems to be going on track, you can understand my nervousness Diary. In fact just this evening after work, while I was waiting for a bus outside the Lederman office, I suddenly looked up at the building and realized something truly tremendous. This great organization, a legend in the world of banking for over 50 years, is now, in a sense, dependant on Robin Einstein Varghese.