Excitement is above average at Black Knight. Today The Globe Bank is coming to see us - the first visit since they found out we dumped their last dollar deal on the brokers.
JJ Ingersoll, head of global focus, has told me to get hold of as many boxes of Stabilo Boss highlighter pens as I can, and a couple of paper knives. He says it will be a presentation the likes of which we've never seen before. Well, not since Jessica Einekleinenachtmusik was here in 1989 when she took the wrong turn and thought she was at Goldman.
I hear a loud booming laugh, like the Nazis saying hello to Poland with unfriendly planes, and I know why: the head of funding for GlobeBank has arrived with his legion of coffee drinking basis-point squeezers, called co-head of dollars and things like that. Before I can even put the pink or lime-green fluorescent pens on the table, Truger Rottweiler is in our James Bond-style meeting room complete with eight television screens and a monorail train that was supposed to go to Heathrow terminals one and four before we ran out of money in February 1993.
Rottweiler says guten Tag and asks me if I know what a repo facility is, and if so why haven't I bothered to use the one we set up for their last Deutschmark deal? I laugh and say: "Never let it be said again that the Swiss don't have a sense of humour."