Three years into my job out of school as a consultant, something funny happened to me. Humiliating is probably more like it. I was asked by Accenture to be the lead consultant on a highly confidential assignment to determine if the firm should invest $50 million in a new venture with a southeastern telecommunications company.

Full disclosure – I was 26-years-old with a portfolio of credit card debt that should have legally disqualified me from assisting with even a personal investment idea, much less one for a multi-billion-dollar firm.

I was assigned to work under a partner who built a reputation for being tough on people – a reputation I learned early on was well-earned. The second day on the assignment, I arrived at work at 7:58 am. She was sitting in her chair and immediately scolded me for my late arrival. My apology to her was shrouded in a look of confusion given that I got there two minutes before the agreed-to start time. She told me that exceeding expectations could not start with meeting the start time. For the remainder of the six-month assignment, I greeted the security guard whose shift began daily at 7:00 am.

The firm’s partners felt I was qualified for this assignment because of a recent stint in the mid-Atlantic with a major utility company. It must have been irrelevant to them that my job on the Maryland assignment was to design a customer management system and my job with the southeastern teleco was to build a business case for a joint venture of two multi-billion dollar companies for a new system for replacing government benefits. Tom-A-to, Tom-a-to.

The executive sponsor assigned from the teleco was a very insightful man who was the senior vice-president of marketing. In the first two monthly executive sessions, I had come away very impressed with this guy. He asked amazing questions while successfully suppressing, other than the tie-matching handkerchief, his Wharton education. Even though our attendee list was small, I still wasn’t sure he could pick me out of a line-up.

Until that night. The day got away from me and around 7:00 pm, it was time to leave. I got on the elevator and the senior VP, by shear coincidence, got on too. My car was on the second floor of the parking deck. That’s important. The teleco paid $1,250 per day for my services, but you wouldn’t know that from the car I drove. It was a Chevrolet Monza. Not a Mazda, which was cool. A Monza, which had no cool, literally, because it had no air conditioning. It didn’t really have any paint, either, which is why people referred to its color as “metal.”

The good news was, there were six or seven floors in the parking deck so the odds were low that his car would be on the same floor as mine. After pressing “2.” I looked up at him with my finger pointing to the panel and asked him which button I could press for him. He said, “Mine is on two too, Andy.” The “two too” homophone play was funny, but the floor his car was parked on wasn’t. My possible saving grace was the vastness of each floor within the parking deck. Maybe our cars weren’t near one another’s.

When the doors of the elevator opened, my Monza was just towards the left. There were no other cars anywhere in the lot except for a brand new Lincoln Towncar two spots from mine. We both walked towards our cars, one of us a bit more self-conscious than the other. I said good-bye and he said the same. I opened my door and – I kid you not – it fell off the hinges. There’s no soft or elegant landing for a 1970’s American car door to fall on a cement parking deck that served as an echo chamber.

The client executive looked like he just saw a walking shark. He asked me if I was ok. “Of course!” I put down my briefcase and tried to lift the car door. I rejected his offer to help after lifting it a foot or so off the ground. He came over anyway and we somehow got the door up and back on its hinges.

Whenever I’m feeling pretty good about my career, I say to myself – “Remember the Monza.” It is very healthy for me to remember where I was when I started. And, it’s really good to laugh at myself too.

This entry was posted by Andy Heyman on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Executive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.