He drank excessively, which I tolerated. I had no choice. I mean this guy was the company for a while. I remember we had a seminar in Paris and we had around twelve hundred engineers from all over Paris and Belgium and all over France into this seminar <…> we made the mistake of opening the bar at lunchtime, which was standard in France, you know. And, oh jeez, he started drinking his gin straight, big tumblers or glasses and I could envision this was going to be a disaster. So after lunch he brings a full glass of gin back to the table <…> and I said, „Peter, get rid of that gin“, you know, „before he gets, gets falling down drunk“. So, poor Peter sacrificed himself. He drinks it. And Bob gets up to start his talk <…> he turns around and reached for his glass, it’s empty and he shouts, „I’m not going to say another word until you fill this glass up.“ Literally. We had no choice. We had to get his glass filled up. And then he went on with the lecture. And he, you know, he got plastered, but the interesting part of it is he was just so damn smart, you know. Even drunk he could just wow these people … You know, later that evening we got Bob back to the hotel which was, you know, for a while I thought he was going to fall under the Metro. God, he was standing at the edge of the Metro, you know, and he was waving back and forth and I’m standing in back of him ready to grab him, you know. Had he fallen in front of the Metro you could forget National. We were over.
