Client Encounter

Every once in a great while, you meet someone and think, I wish we were best friends. This happened to me today, and because I'm easily amused, it didn't take much to prompt this feeling. I was chatting with a client about his business, and made some smartish remark, which caused him to say, "Ooh, that should be the name of your novel!" Then he repeated the phrase the same way I do. This led to some really unproductive discussions about my best-selling self-help book (cowritten with my sister), "French Cats Don't Get Fat", and my solo fiction debut, "Robot Heartbreak". He plans to write a book about Jack Kevorkian called, "Aw, C'mon, You Know You Want To".

Eventually, I had to get things back on track, but I wish I had met this guy in another context. We should be drinking beer and naming our rock bands, not designing indemnity agreements. This encounter did pull me out of a MOOD though, so it served a cosmic purpose.

What is it, though, that allows us to instantly recognize another person as an ally? Is it just narcissism, in the sense that we want someone to laugh at our jokes and share the same sensibility? I don't know what to say about that, so I suppose I will stop writing now.