The real reason he has done so is because, earlier still, I have said "bloody lawyers" to him. As in "there are too many bloody lawyers running rugby in this country", an opinion gleaned from talkback radio.
The sort-of-new chairman of the NZRFU says: "Every now and again I can break out of this serious lawyer mode and do something crazy."
Well, I did ask him what he does for fun. To hop back into a seat which, he says, "could either get hotter or could get cool very quickly", does not sound like what many people would consider sensible, let alone fun.
In 1999, having backed coach John Hart and pledged to step down if the All Blacks lost the World Cup, he resigned as chairman. Fisher says he was talked into taking on the role again. Then the board at the law firm had to be persuaded. Then his wife, Helen. "I wouldn't say she was over the moon."
And that rumbling noise is the sound of discontent from provincial rugby officials unhappy with the NZRFU's response to Sir Thomas Eichelbaum's report on what Fisher and I have agreed to call "the fiasco".
I'm not sure whether to congratulate him or offer my commiserations. He says, "Yeah, I'm not sure either, actually."
He doesn't do it for the money. Board members are paid $20,000 a year; the chairman gets $50,000. Fisher gets nothing: it goes directly into the coffers of the law firm. He does it, he says, for the love of rugby. And because, having already done the job, he has the experience to do it again.
Still, settling into this particular seat sounds like preparation for an audition for the gameshow The Chair, where live alligators are suspended over the heads of the contestants. "I don't feel the alligators are hanging over me," Fisher says, "I think they're snapping at the heels."
You could say that. Since news of Fisher's re-appointment was announced, quite a few people have been really quite rude. This paper ran a front page quote by rugby commentator Wynne Gray: "Recycling Rob Fisher will not help NZ rugby." From across the ditch, the chief executive of the Australian Rugby Union, John O'Neill, said his appointment was "a bit of a puzzle ... we may well have a different view of the landscape".
Fisher admits to "relief" about the Eichelbaum report. "I didn't come out of it, personally, too badly." Did he think he might? "You never know, do you?"
Now his job is "to steady the ship". He's honest enough to acknowledge that his appointment looks to the public to be more shifting of the deckchairs. A public which has to be persuaded to trust that Fisher and his crew are up to rowing a dinghy across a millpond.
The resignation of chairman Murray McCaw from the board yesterday might come as a relief - although he wouldn't ever put it like that. There has been enough "knocking of people".
He says of O'Neill that "if he was in town tonight, I'd be going down the road to have a beer with him".
Of course, he's going to have to work at those rugby relationships, but that casual mateship does rather give emphasis to the NZRFU's reputation as an old boys' club, a closed shop.
Fisher takes the point. "That was, or is, a valid criticism."
In the new spirit of openness, Fisher says he will reinstate the post-board-meeting press conferences that were part of his earlier reign and which vanished under McCaw.
"I think we do want to be more open - if we can be." Despite the air guitar admission, that "if we can be" is pure bloody cautious lawyer.
The 58-year-old specialist in environmental law played his first game of rugby at the age of five. He quit at 40. Which wasn't a bad run for a boy who contracted polio as a child while living on Thursday Island, where his Anglican vicar father was running a mission. He made the first XV at Kings. His parents "gave up a great deal" to send him and his sister to private schools.
He got into rugby administration while at law school at Auckland University, where he took to the field with long hair, a handlebar moustache and mutton-chop sideburns. Apparently, he was very good at selling raffle tickets. He's not very amused when reminded of this, but he can be self-deprecating about his on-field career. "I played in a lot of good teams. I made up the numbers."
One of his "minor claims to fame" was to captain the side Grahame Thorne started out in the year he became an All Black. I pull Fisher's leg a bit about reflected glory; he grins. He does not smile easily. He can look dour on the telly, but I suspect that's the tough-men-of-union look that's as compulsory as the lawyer's suit. He positively beams when I ask him for the names of the rugby players who have been sending messages of support. "Oh, I don't want to start naming the names, because you'll say 'reflected glory'."
So he can take a bit of a tease. He doesn't take the flak personally, he says, he has broad shoulders. But he is talking, with barely concealed longing, of going home this evening to the "moral support" of his family. He takes a call in his office, chats for a while with a grandson about trucks; asks his wife, "did you get the wine?"
I was going to buy him a beer - we were supposed to meet in the lobby of a hotel. But he spent Wednesday stuck in the fog at Wellington airport, flew in on Thursday morning and, when we catch up on Thursday evening, he hasn't yet got home to change. He's wearing yesterday's clothes, although you'd never know it to look at him. He's a tidy chap who apologises for the non-existent mess in his tidy office.
I've taken him a souvenir. A newspaper poster which says "Rugby Provinces Want Blood".
He looks at it steadily for quite a long time. Then Rob Fisher, the man with the most unenviable job in the country, says: "That might be worth framing. We'll wait and see."
Sir Thomas Eichelbaum's full report
