Happy days are here again

Two posts in a day is pretty excessive, but I need an outlet for this great joy that I'm feeling right now. Is it possible to be completely joyful and completely frustrated at the same time?

We've just been asked to work on a fairly simple straightforward project that could potentially wrap up in a month. A flurry of paperwork, some people sign things and everything is done. Very minimum fees.

But enter the other side's lawyer, impossibly earnest, thorough, careful, prudent, picky, verbose... sometimes when I'm talking to him, it's almost as though I'm trying to communicate underwater. With the dead. Everything... goes.. reallll... slow. I'm sure even my metabolism slows down so I don't have a heart attack.

If I can get away with saying something twice, then it's been a great day. Otherwise, I could be saying the same thing over 2 days, using different words, different inflections, pulling out different strands of hair. We spend so much time on the phone together and so much time trying to relate to each other and to just get along (contract clause-wise) that I almost feel obliged to ask him what time he's coming home for dinner.

I've actually re-done my makeup once over whilst having a discussion with him about why the arbitration clause should be like this, and not like that. Why arbitrate in Singapore, he asks. Why is the sky? What is the moon? Why is water wet? I also have really deep incisive questions for him.

With him on the file, this transaction will carry over into 2007 and become one of our major sources of revenue for this financial year. I'll also have the opportunity to age 20 years, as we explore together the potential consequences of, maybe, perhaps, could we consider using straight quotation marks in the document instead of curved quotation marks. And if we could change the agreement from letter format to agreement format, and then back again to a letter. Or should we still have an agreement format? What do I think?

Maybe instead of taking the clients out to lunch, we should take him. After all, he's the one that brings in the revenue for us. The only problem is that I might just kill him on sight. And then we'd really have slaughtered the golden goose.