I matched with someone who turned out to sell software to my department
Posted as the_vendor_problem
- Looking for
- anybody at all who does not work in my industry
- Experience
- Eight years, both directions, one extremely awkward discovery.
- Around
- uptown, Dallas
Three messages in, we were getting on well, and then he mentioned where he worked and I realised I had been in a room with him twice that year. He was decent about it. I was not, particularly, because I panicked. We both stopped writing and I spent the following quarter avoiding a building.
Thirty three, uptown, switch, eight years. The rule I now have is simple and absolute: nobody in my industry, nobody who sells into it, nobody who consults for it. In this metro that eliminates a genuinely large number of people and I have accepted the cost. If your work involves the same set of acronyms mine does, we are going to find out early because I will ask, and it is not personal.
What I want beyond that is somebody who can genuinely go both ways. I lead perhaps sixty percent of the time and I am not interested in being the only one who ever does. I have had two partners who said switch and meant that they would be led once, awkwardly, as a favour.
I like protocol on both sides of it and I have very little interest in impact in either direction. Practical: uptown, live alone, can host, normal hours, and I travel for work about a week a month.
Not looking for anyone who wants to negotiate which one I am going to be for the next three months. Not looking for a person who finds the industry rule paranoid, because it is not, it is arithmetic.