I received a message from someone who made a judgment about me based on previous association, which was out of order, I think. He then followed up with the following conversation.
A little background. This person fell off the face of the earth for at least 5 years. I went to a meeting he was holding and we chatted for a few minutes, which was all the time we had because he had to facilitate and I had to run. During our conversation, he asked me what I was doing. I told him that I was going to venture into the land of freelancing. He said that he knew someone and to call him. I called him, he told me to send his info to him and he said that he would see what he could do. I misplaced the paper with his info on it and called him again.
He said something to the effect that he gave me his information two times and he didn’t know if that was a good look. He also said that the last time we spoke, I was more efficient.
There were a couple things I could have said to this. Instead, I told him that if he was willing to help me, it would be appreciated; if he didn’t, I respect that, too. I’m not going to ask anyone to do anything for me that they don’t want to do.
I did send him an email stating that he only gave me his email address once and I can see how losing a post-it-note can be seen as inefficient. Also, let me know if he was willing to help.
Here is part of the message:
“…basically I am pretty confident that you are very capable, honestly it has been a long time since we have had any real conversation and I recall the last time we spoke you were more concerned with where I’d been than what we could do to help each other.”
In my opinion, that is some petty female stuff.
So, how are you going to judge me and you don’t even know what’s been happening?
And, the last part was really nonsensical to me. I was more concerned about where he had been? Ok, I don’t know about other people, but if someone I was cool with reached out to me that I hadn’t heard from in a long time, I do want to know what’s been going on in their lives. So, excuse me for caring.
Also, had the one of the first things out of of my mouth would have been about work or any other project, I probably would have been viewed as selfish or self-serving.
I responded my thanking him and asking him to check his schedule to speak. Honestly, if he doesn’t get back to me, I don’t care. I see that he is still egotistical and judgmental (which was why his last venture did not work), and there is no place in my world for people such as these.
Image: truthworks.org