Uncle Moneybags

I met my new client for the first time, yesterday, and then spent a full 95 minutes in his presence today.

I thank God I was chaperoned by one of my big-brotherly male coworkers.

At past jobs, my clients flirted with me. It's an occupational hazard when you're a 20-something female in a field where your commercial real estate clients are overwhelmingly male with overwhelmingly large pocketbooks that give them an overwhelmingly large sense of entitlement. Their flirtations were mostly benign and confined to the conference room, or cocktail parties for real estate promotions. But this character is something else, altogether.

Unlike past clients - and my present clients on other projects - who oozed money without ever talking about it except in the context of what they wanted to spend on their project, Uncle Moneybags talks about it. All the time. Seriously.

"I pay $500 per month for a climate controlled storage unit for my 5,000 bottles of wine."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand?

"I was thinking about building a 15,000 SF house in Preston Hollow a few years ago, about $5 million or so, but decided not to."

That's quite the non sequitur. What, pray tell, does that have to do with asbestos abatement?

And he's one of those people who talks about money all the time, talks about how much money he spends, and then talks about how cheap he is and how much he hates to spend money. Wonderful.

And he hardly talked to Radio at all. Most of his comments were directed towards me. Even though I'm the subordinate in the office, the little helper, I received the brunt of his attention. Radio's the big man on the project. I'm just a CAD monkey, right now, inputting the existing floor plans into the computer so they make sense. But noooooooo. He hardly looked at Radio the whole time.

Granted, I was wearing white jeans, and according to my guy friends, a girl in white jeans is difficult to pry your eyes from, but still. When I left the room to investigate things, he inevitably followed, even if Radio was in the middle of discussing things with him. Important things. Sticky issues we might run into.

Like asbestos abatement.

Sigh. Maybe next time we go, his 25 year old ex-girlfriend - who's living in the apartment, right now, while the apartment he's bought for her is being renovated - will be the only one there. I have a sneaking suspicion he'll be there, though.

Maybe it's time to invest in a couple of muumuus.