What is the strangest thing you have ever seen in your career?

[Jim Searing]

Long career, brief career, doesn't matter. What is the most unusual, weirdest, strangest thing you've ever seen?

[CREOpoint]

Great topic.
I was going for lunch about ten years ago with the EVP and an SVP of one of Canada's largest developers, and walking through the most famous mall in Canada, which they owned.
We had to take an elevator down and were waiting and chatting when the EVP went "humph" and I noticed he glanced up.
There,stuck in the elevator lock, was a key chain composed of likely 100 or more keys - it was huge!
Very likely, not soon after, I suspect, a staff member was "asked" if he/she was missing their keys (to likely every store in the place).
What makes this strange, is not that keys were lost in this way (although one would think they'd be missed); but that of all the people in the world to find them, it would be the guy who was the absolute boss...

[Jim Searing]

My strangest moment was being awoken while on vacation in August 1991 and learning that there was a coup by hard-liners against Mikhail Gorbachev, the President of the Soviet Union. Since I was one of the people responsible for Ernst & Young's operations in Moscow (EY was the first accounting firm to enter the market), I drove right to the office. First, we checked on the whereabouts and safety of our people headquartered there, and confirmed communications links and contingency plans for evacuations. Then we contacted all of our clients to assess 'who was where.' Since our office had open links (many other phone lines and telexes were cut at that time), we used our network to contact client personnel, and set up a knowledge base which included location, family in country, contact info, availability of corporate jets (for exiting), evacuation plans and intentions, etc.

Each day, we faxed (this was before the worldwide web) an update to our clients by 830 AM on what happened overnite and what other clients were doing. I was interviewed by morning news shows and spent the week glued to the TV, international press and constant contact with clients, senior management and colleagues. By the end of the week, we all celebrated the failure of the coup and what it meant to the end of communist rule, the collapse of the Soviet Union and possibly the end of the Cold War.

Our relationships with the Fortune 500 companies that were doing business there were solidified and our firm was able to build a leading practice in Russia and many of the former republics. The three biggest lessons I learned about real-time business crisis management: Focusing on people first; staying in close touch with clients; and responding decisively.

[sandy champlin]

fascinating....a sound course of action and logical response

[Jean-Claude Goldenstein]

I have a fairly scary/military one from when I did some pro-bono work directly for the President of Colombia Alvaro Uribe (whose father and many of his friends were killed by FARC rebels). During my lunch with him at his summer home in Cartagena we were litteraly surrounded by tanks and a fully armed military helicopter was stationary right above us. He seemed very used to it but I was not...

[CREOpoint]

I got another one.
In 1986 I had a meeting with a CEO named Rocky XXX in a suburb of Toronto at 0900. I showed up on time for the meeting but there was some obvious confusion at the reception desk.
Finally, a well tailored Exec Asst came out and said, "Mr. French, there seems to be some confusion. You're not meeting with Mr. X at 9, you're meeting with Mr. Y, but the meeting is supposed to be at your office in Ottawa."
Turned out that Mr. Y was meeting with a different Brian French in a different city at exactly the same time as I was meeting with Rocky.
That was weird.

[Stephen Alter]

We were doing a inspection, final walk through of a Luxury multifamily deal that we were purchasing and when we went into one of the units there was next to no furniture through the entire place but yet there was a mattress on the bedroom floor without even a sheet and only a blanket. On the window shelf there was a couple of books that titled, "how to win at Blackjack, How to win at the race tack", and How to win at Lotto.
I guess that gambling isn't a good profession.