It normally starts with a phonecall or an email from someone you haven't seen around for a few months.
"Hi. How are you doing? Why don't we get together for a drink?"
This usually trips the alarm because for the last six years he's been famously too busy to even return calls. Until recently, as you will have noticed in the trades, he was something very, very senior in an agency.
The venue is one of the private member's clubs or, if it's lunch, one of the industry favoured Soho troughs where women with prominent tendons and a Botox rictus push salads around plates in the company of richer and uglier men.
Remarkably, he'll already be there when you arrive. This could be a new found politeness and humility or, more likely, the corner table is now as near as he's going to get to a West End office and you're his fourth meeting today.
He - and it's invariably a guy, women have more dignity - is looking faintly dishevelled, the result of a string of late nights. He looks like he may have spent last night on someone's sofa. As you get closer you'll also notice that he's waxen with a combination of substance abuse and self-loathing.
Polite greetings out of the way, lunch is ordered.
"Shall we skip straight to the main?" he asks, his lightly tripping tone implying that time rather than cost is the issue.
And suddenly you can't put it off any longer so you ask the fatal question...
"So how are things?"
His eyes light up with the enthusiastic intensity of suicide bombers or the Born Again. "Incredibly busy at the moment"
"So you've left... and here you insert the name of the criminally inept and hubristic troupe of village idiots that, until last month, paid his insane salary. As you do his entire body twitches involuntarily.
It's like a particularly ugly road accident. You don't want to go any closer, you don't want to get involved, but some ghoulish fascination impels you to. Against all sense you ask,
"So what are you up to?"
The eyes light up again and you're off on a breathless half-hour long roller coaster of cobbled together business jargon and insane dreams. At some point the term 'Working on a variety of projects' crops up. Interestingly this is actually true - as long as you count catching up on the recycling and painting the bathroom ceiling. There's around a fifty percent chance he'll be 'moving into coaching'. This is a cracker. If those that can do and those that can't teach, why is it always those that have screwed up monumentally that coach? He'll definitely be 'Consulting'. They say that in London you're never more than ten feet away from a rat - in some postcodes, consultant densities must be giving the rats pause. Interestingly, the rodents always seem to be occupied with something.
At around the thirty-fifth minute a wave of depression rolls over you. This is a guy who left his wife and kids for his PA at the height of his powers. Who's spent enough on drugs to buy your house yet has no more tucked away for a rainy day than a dreary loft in Shoreditch with a savage mortgage and the prospect of alimony bills lining his path to penury like cheap wallpaper. When he talks about options and opportunities you fear he's looking at straight choice between begging his family to take him back and opening his veins in the toilets at the Met bar. He's like a black hole sucking out those last few molecules of optimism you've been hoarding to get yourself through this. So you try to guide the conversation to a conclusion.
And this is, somehow the most terrible part. You realise that he's not going to tap you for a loan, a job, a contact or even a consultancy gig. He knows infinitely better than you that not a single one of his supposed skills or talents is of any relevance whatever to anyone still in control of a budget. He's a middle-man riding the coat tails of a bubble that he never understood when he was exploiting it and is now more deflated than the look in his eyes. He doesn't want your money or even your sympathy he just wants you to see him and listen to him so he can cling for another week to the delusion he's still a player.
On the way home you give twenty pounds to a startled Big Issue seller.