6:30 Sycophant drops by on his way out.

Client meeting next Friday but wants complete turn of a pitch for first thing tomorrow morning (tomorrow morning = when he finally gets around to looking at it at some point next week).

A quick calculation; theres no way Im getting out of here before four in the morning.

Ah, the life of an investment banking analyst.

What will your hours be. How much work do you actually do? Do you really just play Solitaire most of the day and then only work at night?

Some days youll be so busy that you have to discreetly use a bottle under your desk if you need to go to the bathroom.

Other days youll have so little to do that you can take 3-hour lunch breaks and download different themes for Windows Solitaire.

Doing investment banking is like doing drugs: on your good trips you dance in clouds of marshmallows, surrounded by beautiful women (or men) serving you fruit in canopies.

On your bad trips you scratch your eyes out and jump off buildings.

This 24-hour period was a bad trip. And unlike The Bitter Investment Banker Email. it actually happened.

7:30 AM I am woken up by an Associate at work asking where I am. He told me to come in at 8:00 AM to send out a status report. Its 7:30 and Im not there yet, so a cloud of panic has descended. I roll out of bed, shower for a minute and head into work.

8:00 AM 9:00 AM The Associate hands me a marked-up version of the status report in question. Most of his changes consist of adding/deleting commas, capitalizing nouns or changing font sizes. I send it to our team at 8:55, in advance of our call at 9:00.

I am vaguely listening but also working on a pitch book for an IPO in the background multi-tasking is easy when all you do is copy and paste Excel into PowerPoint. 12:30 PM We send out a draft of the IPO pitch book to 3 Managing Directors who will be at the meeting the next day. This is the final version, which means that everything will be scrapped and re-done in the next 24 hours.

12:45 PM One of the Managing Directors is traveling and has requested a Briefing Book on the company were pitching because he doesnt know anything about it. Its not feasible to FedEx the book because he is 3,000 miles away and needs it ASAP we need to PDF this bad boy.

1:00 PM The Associate drops off revisions to a presentation were working on for another client. I tell him I dont have bandwidth because Im working on a big IPO pitch for the next day as well.

He tells me to finish by 5 so he can give me more changes and I can turn another revision by the morning. Its probably going to be an all-nighter.

1:30 PM One of the Managing Directors who received the Briefing Book calls another Associate (Associate #2) on my team and yells at him for sending 100 pages of material its taking 30 minutes to print out everything.

The Associate takes the brunt of the damage. Ive cleverly avoided the fallout by having Associate #2 be the point person for this project.

3:30 PM After speaking with our equity research analyst, the Managing Director decides we need to add more analysis to our pitch and focus on completely different metrics. I need to re-do most of my work.

5:00 PM I finish up with the other client presentation that Associate #1 wanted me to finish. Now its a waiting game on that one as I continue revising the IPO pitch.

7:30 PM Im eating dinner at my desk. No time to go join everyone else today but its Japanese food so Im satisfied. Meanwhile someone from Equity Capital Markets. the team responsible for IPOs, comes over and tells me to scrap all the analysis the MD wanted.

10:00 PM I get last-minute changes from everyone else on the team. Shouldnt take too long to process, but production can only start printing at midnight, which means Im going to be here until 1 AM minimum.

10:15 PM As Im going through changes, Associate #1 stops by and has a bunch of changes to the client presentation I finished at 5 PM. I tell him I can only get started after 1 AM so I probably wont have anything until the next morning. Dance, monkey.

12:30 AM I finish up and production starts printing the presentations. Associate #2 comes over to supervise the production and review the finished product.

1:00 AM I notice an inconsistency on 1 slide stock prices have been updated earlier in the presentation but not here. Time to check over everything again .

2:00 AM Were done re-checking every single page for the same mistake now. Time to re-print.

2:15 AM The printers all have paper jams and are out of ink. Since its late, the printing/production crew has disappeared and I have become the production team.

2:15 3:30 AM I need to refill the ink and fix all the printers. This requires a group effort so I call some other analysts over to help.

4:00 AM Go home and go to sleep. I need to wake up by 6 to finish work on the presentation Associate #1 told me to finish by the morning.

6:00 AM Ive overslept. Associate #1 is already up and has left 3 voicemails on my cell phone asking why I havent sent the presentation to our client yet. I Blackberry him that I was up all night working on another pitch and was going to send it by 9 but needed an hour of sleep first.

6:15 AM 6:30 AM As Im coming into the office were trading angry emails back and forth. He says I should have emailed our entire group saying that the presentation would be late.

8:00 AM Associate #1 strolls into the office just as Im about to hit the Send button. I tell him that Im about to send the presentation.

He tells me to email everyone twice once to tell them that theyll get the presentation in the next 2 minutes, and then once again to actually send the presentation.