On the face of it being Scottish Rugby chief executive sounds like a great job. A salary of around £350,000 a year, the best seat in the house for Scotland games, a chance to meet Princess Anne at matches and priority tickets for Taylor Swift concerts.
There is the opportunity to travel the world following the Scotland rugby team - Canada, USA, Chile and Uruguay this summer alone - and the chance to take up as many end of season rugby dinner invites as you like.
You don’t really have to explain yourself publicly apart from at the Scottish Rugby AGM and even then you read a prepared script off an autocue. There are always sandwiches and strawberry tarts on offer afterwards if you are hungry.
Yet Scottish Rugby - who reported a deficit of £10m in the last financial year- still can’t fill the top job after the man they had in mind to replace Mark Dodson as chief executive changed his mind at the last minute.
READ MORE: Scottish Rugby's hunt for a new CEO dealt a major blow
Although his identity has not been made public it is understood he had strong links to English Rugby.
Rather than offer the post to the person who came second in the selection process the SRU has decided to re-advertise the job. How long it will take to make a new appointment is anybody’s guess.
The sorry saga began when John McGuigan, president of Scottish Rugby Limited, offered the candidate the job in late April and he accepted in early May.
Everything was going swimmingly with an announcement due last week until the candidate got a better offer and bailed on them.
Dodson left the company last month after 12-and-a-half years so there is nobody in charge of the shop at Murrayfield for the foreseeable future.
There isn’t even a rugby performance director - the top job on the playing side as that person is Gregor Townsend’s boss - because Jim Mallinder has also gone.
It is now likely that the new performance director - whose appointment was due to be rubber-stamped by the new chief executive - may get the job without any input from whoever gets the job of CEO.
Let’s hope they get on when they are eventually appointed and meet for the first time.
What a mess it all is. It does make you wonder how one of the biggest sporting organisations in the UK allowed itself to be led up the garden path by someone who was clearly speaking to another potential employer throughout his negotiations with the SRU.
John McGuigan has been like a breath of fresh air since he took over as chairman of Scottish Rugby Limited.
Open, pro-active and straight-talking, he has given Scottish rugby in general a much-needed shot in the arm but he doesn’t come out of this debacle looking good.
He met the man he had backed for the job more than once and must have been taken in by whoever it was. For someone with his business experience to be strung along then dumped at the altar will be hard to take.
The importance of getting people into the two top jobs sooner rather than later has been brought into sharp focus by a number of recent events.
The first is the dismal performance of Edinburgh this season. The team under head coach Sean Everitt, who was handed a contract extension only five months ago by the previous regime of Dodson and Mallinder, has under performed.
READ MORE: Five games that cost Edinburgh a place in the URC play-offs
The capital club failed to make the top eight that qualified for the end-of-season URC play-offs and also missed out on participation in the financially lucrative Champions Cup yet Everitt was given a new deal that runs until June 2026.
Who reviews Everitt’s poor performance and tries to work out what went wrong with nobody in charge at the top of Scottish Rugby?
The semi-pro Super Series is over and will be replaced by a series of matches involving Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors 'A' teams. Have these new plans been thought through? Who will they play? How much money will be needed to fund them?
The chief executive would be sitting down with the performance director demanding answers to these vital questions as a matter of urgency but of course neither one of them has been appointed.
McGuigan may be the temporary public face of Scottish Rugby but doesn’t have the expertise to decide such crucial issues.
Off the field, there is a backlog of projects waiting to be given the green light by the new chief executive, among them plans for a multi-million-pound redevelopment of Scottish Gas Murrayfield.
There are three key “themes” proposed by external consultants waiting for approval regarding the stadium.
The external consultants, that have not been named, called for a five-year plan to address immediate, short-term improvements to Murrayfield. They also called for proposals over the same period to be introduced to look into ways to increase revenues.
On top of that they recommended an immediate feasibility study to investigate ways to improve the wider Murrayfield campus. Although it has not been confirmed that is likely to include the building of a hotel on site.
Mark Laidlaw, director of Murrayfield stadium operations, has already met with Scottish Rugby Limited board member Chris Stewart, a world-renowned property developer, to discuss the future of the famous stadium that celebrates its 100th anniversary next year.
READ MORE: Rob Robertson: Time to start work on Murrayfield upgrades
The pair of them must be desperate to get things moving as must others within the organisation that will be treading water until the new chief executive and performance director are appointed.
The search for a new chief executive is still being led by global consulting firm Korn Ferry who won the tender for the contract and were told they needed to come up with a diverse range of candidates.
There was a hope that Scottish Rugby may break with tradition and appoint a female chief executive for the first time but they offered the job to a man who turned it down.
Korn Ferry advertised the job throughout the world and made clear to prospective applicants they needed to have expert knowledge of fan engagement, private equity, globalisation and governance.
They told applicants they were looking for a ‘great sports leader’ with the ability to rally people behind a shared purpose and that person had to be experienced at complex stakeholder management.
They needed to have a blend of commercial and sports experience and be ‘self-aware.’ They were expecting the candidates to fall within three categories - sports, retail and media with some candidates being a hybrid of all three.
They will now have to start the whole process all over again.
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