Being a consultant is hard. One moment you're Rambo flying up and down the organisation, fixing problems with unlimited access to people and systems and in the next, you're held hostage with no chance of fleeing, constantly bombarded by questions you've never heard about before, interrogated by the customers smartest kids or hired 3rd party experts.
While you work as hard as you can muster to debug production problems, you're constantly tested ("how much does this guy actually know?" Let's try to ask about ...) or pinched with small needles ("it's not nice what Escenic does there with the XML..."). It feels like your brain is sizzling in a frying pan. No matter how long you work, you always feel you need to excuse leaving for the airport. "When is your plane?" is customer project manager's favourite question. It means: let me calculate how long you can stay in the office before running to the airport taxi so that we can squeeze as much brain juice out of you as we can. We have paid dearly for you after all.
