Friday, August 22, 2008

he must have seen the SUCKER sign over my head

I was hustling to work today, late to our weekly status call (normally it's on Thursdays, when I take the train in from suburbia and am in the office early. But without fail, whenever it's rescheduled I am late or miss it.) This is troubling because a major part of my job is managing the flow of information between parties, and there are some questions for the client that only I have details about. Plus it's just bad form.

Of course, I didn't realize today was status until I had already lollygagged around at home, chewing my Crispix while watching the episode of NewsRadio that I fell asleep to last night. So I rushed out and was about 200 yards from the front door to the building when a group of beefy Euro/club looking guys with spiky hair walked past, taking up nearly all of the sidewalk. I flattened myself against the brick walk and squeezed past. But then one of them called to me.

UGH, I wish I had kept going! While I looked at my watch every 30 seconds, the guy pitched me some really *awesome* deal at a shi-shi salon in the Gold Coast, and if I paid for this gift certificate, I'd get two visits of all kinds of luxurious blablablas for a FRACTION of the cost I'd normally pay.

If I were smarter/more alert/not so flustered I would have said Sorry, my mom still cuts my hair (what would he know, it was in a bun) and be on my way. But what did I do instead? Hemmed and hawed until he threw in two for a reduced price of one and wrote a check, thinking Hell, at least I have an excuse for being late to the status meeting.

When I got to work, not only did I look bad for missing the meeting entirely, I looked stupid for giving some random guy money for services at a salon I'd never even heard of. When I got to work I checked, and it's legitimate, but seriously, this is one of the dumbest things I've done in a really long time.

1 comment:

Jon said...

wait, so their whole marketing campaign is to randomly stop people on the street and hope they can convince them to buy discount coupons? Interesting... Mostly though, I'm surprised they took a check. I didn't know you could still write checks these days. I thought people stopped doing that in 1998.