November 14, 2003

Clients

If you're wondering where I ran off to, let's just say the past 48 hours have been a tad crazy.

Yesterday and today I attended a seminar here in New Orleans entitled, "Asbestos Litigation in the 21st Century". (Well, it's interesting to me). There were speakers there from all over the country, and, consequently, attendees there from all over. Several of our clients attended, so my boss had the good idea to organize dinner for them last night so we could all hang out and make sure they remember to keep sending us business.

The game plan was that we rented a bus (yes, just like in high school) that took us from the hotel where the conference was held to The Dock, a new restaurant on the lakefront. After dinner, said bus would shuttle us to Mid City Lanes, home of the infamous Rock 'n Bowl. Since I attended the conference, I was asked to be Julie, cruise director for the evening.

Mind you, I'd never met any of these clients until last night when the bus showed up. However, I was game. The bus, and clients, showed up on time, and we headed for The Dock. Folks were pretty quiet on the bus, and dinner at The Dock was fun. Of course, during dinner we were all drinking, so people became more animated.

Once we got to Rock 'n Bowl, everyone was very happy. The clients split up into groups of four, got longneck beers (many said this was necessary to recover their misspent youth) and began bowling. One of the clients got the idea that on the scoresheets, the bowlers should use their "stripper names". For the uninitiated, your stripper name is the name of your first pet plus the name of the first street you lived on (for the curious, my stripper name is Baby Lemans. Nice).

By the time we got them back on the bus at 11, they were louder than all three of my teenage cousins combined, amplified by 10. I felt like the group's mom -- I kept hearing shouts from the back of the bus of, "Jennifer! It's cooolllldddd, can't you turn on the heater?", "Jennifer, I want to go to Bourbon Street. When do we get there?" and, my favorite, "Jennifer, Fluffy keeps hitting me" (they refused to stop using their stripper names at any point in the evening).

When we returned to the hotel, I thanked them all for coming and then promptly threw them off the bus. The point of this evening was for me to get to know our clients so they feel comfortable coming to me with their problems, and will send us even more business. The big problem now is that I don't know their real names. But I do know Fluffy, Muffin and Choo-Choo.

Posted by Kitty at November 14, 2003 05:05 PM

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