Tuesday's Bad Dates -- Paul, part 2

(continued from last week)

So there I was at a group dinner date. You'd have thought that Paul would have introduced me around. Or sat next to me. But somehow we ended up across the table from one another and, like, three people down. And I was left to make conversation with people in closer proximity to me all on my lonesome.

I first started talking to some guy whose name I forget. I'll just call him economist. 'Cause he had a PhD in economics. Which he told me right off the bat.

"Wow!" I said. "That's really interesting. So, Mr. Economist, what do you think of the state of our nation's economy presently?"

To which he responded: "Oh, I'm not THAT kind of economist."

(What other kind of economist is there?)

"What other kind of economist is there?" I asked.

I forget his exact response, but it did have the terms 'large scale corporations', 'global', and 'projections'.

"Oh. So, what do you DO, exactly?"

"I teach economics classes, (of course) and I write articles (of course) and I'm a corporate consultant (ah, yes. a consultant.)"

I got real excited and animated at this point: "Oh, that's really cool. I had a friend who worked as a corporate consultant. She did things like look at the procedures in companies and interview workers and review their finances. Then she saw what was working and what wasn't and made suggestions to make things work better. She recommended an inventory tracking software program for all the Disney Stores in the country and trained all the managers in how to use it. Of course, they are, like, bankrupt now- maybe it was her consultant fees! Ha Ha!"

"Yeah, I don't do that."

"Oh. So what DO you do, exactly?"

"I tell companies what I think is going to happen globally over the next 18 months and how they should prepare for it."

"Oh. So how do you make the projections for what's going to happen over the next 18 months?"

"Well, we consult journal articles."

"The journal articles that YOU write?"

"Yeah."

"Oh......so if you are wrong in your projections, do you give them their money back?"

"I can't be held responsible if the projections are wrong. Global economics is very complex"

(Can I just say here -- why the hell hadn't Paul, MY DATE, rescued me from this tool?) If he had, then I probably wouldn't have said:

"So you are kind of like that octopus that picked the world cup winners?"

Well, I thought it was funny. But I was forced to strike up a conversation with somebody else after that comment. And, no, that somebody else still wasn't my date for the night...