**Showdown at the TS Corral**

[Cue Spaghetti Western whistling]

Tomorrow, I have a potentially dangerous conference call at work. I wrote a case study for a large IT vendor who relies on local partners to help market and implement their products. Anyway, this particular partner had their own agenda for the case study, and came back in the review process with major changes in the direction of the story. Negotiations between myself and the partner failed, and now we're going to have a conference call with the IT director from the customer, the principals from the partner consulting firm, the aggressive partner marketing manager, product managers from the large IT vendor, the customer evidence manager that signs our check, and my boss.

Seriously, it feels like the gunfight at the OK Corral.

UPDATE: So what happened was that the customer and large IT vendor started talking on the conference call, and decided on a very different direction for the case study than the partner had envisioned. Now, I will rewrite the case study (getting paid again, of course) in way that gives the partner even less of what they want. Basically, the reason this happened was because the partner was too greedy. I already tried to accommodate them to a large extent, but they wanted more. As the call ended, the partner marketing manager reminded me of the classic Greek tragic characters whose hubris is their downfall.