Autopsis

“Hold on, I’ve got to take this call” 

“Ok, no problem,” I said. 

I was sitting in my friend’s office in Chicago. I’ll call him Tony. 

His large and expansive office suite was strangely quiet. The multiple offices and numerous
cubicles, replete with plush office furniture and high tech chairs, were mostly empty.
I could tell by the tone of the conversation that it wasn’t a pleasant call for Tony. He wasn’t having
many pleasant calls these days. 

When I first met him, over ten years before, he was my hero. He already had people working for
him, he was working on leading edge projects, and he was getting his purchase orders signed by
the vice presidents he was hob knobbing with at General Electric, where we were both
consultants. 

In the intervening decade, he’d built a large consulting organization in the Chicago area.
Until the phone call, we’d spent most of our time talking about his Porsche 911. The phone call
changed the tone. 

He hung up the phone and let out a long sigh. 

“They gave me another week,” he said bleakly.

The rest of the story is here: www.hackneys.com/docs/independenceday.pdf