Depth charge
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Conference Call Anatomy™
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Continuing our theme of submarine warfare, another rare but, among the cognoscenti highly-prized, technique is the depth charge. Rare, because you will only see this when an all-hands conference call has taken the sort of turn for the worse[1] that most experienced conference call convenors can easily avoid[2]. As any fule kno, a conference call is no place to raise anything of significance to which you don't already know the answer.
Anyway, a depth charge: That critical deal approval call has turned into a shit-show. The presenter — a junior on the deal team, hoping unrealistically for promotion — is unprepared, transparently does not understand his deal and, to boot[3], has committed that mortal error of not warming up the controller group who are due to hear his application. Further, the cantankerous guy from Treasury legal got out the wrong side of bed this morning and is of a mood to make an example out of young sir in front of the assembled.
The young fellow proceeds and, in the face of the most innocuous question from compliance limply descends into a chaos of stuttering and patent fabrication, punctuated by awkward pauses, during which a distant voice is picked up an a someone’s microphone — whose, we cannot say[4]. The voice —is quiet, but clear, and sounding as though it has come from a mouth turned from the handset in a tone of surreptition, says:
“Man this deal is a piece of shit.”
Sir Jerrold Baxter-Morley, MD of the deal team, wakes up and explodes in a beetroot-faced, eye-bulging squawk of indignance: this is his deal, for his old Eton school-chum Buffer Montague, now a restaurateur and sometime introducing broker in the Middle East.
“Who said that? WHO SAID THAT!?”
But there is no reply, just another awkward pause. But, by means of something that may have been serendipitous background dealing-floor banter, the damage is done. The remark has articulated only what every controller was quietly thinking, and it fortifies them in their opposition.