It will doubtless come as cold comfort to the now fractured board of Vocus – our favourite telco-cum-real-life-soap-opera – that it was awarded the prize for "Best Board" at Tuesday night's East Coles' 2015 Corporate Performance Awards.
Seriously, you can't make this stuff up ...
The honour was bestowed at a glittering event at Sydney's Establishment approximately two hours before the Vocus board members James Spenceley and Tony Grist launched their spectacularly ham-fisted board coup in Melbourne.
And while that might be written off as just bad timing – the reaction when we phoned Nick Coles, MD of East Coles, Thursday morning is something else again.
"Talk about bad timing!" we ventured.
"Why, has something happened to them?" he replied.
Awkward pause. Brief recap of the saga that has had all of corporate Australia talking for the previous 36 hours – and been the subject of countless column inches, in print and online.
"Oh," Coles replied. "I suppose that explains why they weren't there to collect their award."
Ya think?
But who, we hear many of you ask, exactly is East Coles and what are its credentials for giving out awards? According to its PR gumpf: "In existence for over 20 years, East Coles has developed deep relationships with key market participants to ensure the highest quality data samples."
Relationships so deep, it seems, that they didn't even know one of their award winners had had a complete meltdown ... either on the night it happened or two days after the fact. The expression "finger on the pulse" jumps to mind...
