Three accounts this year followed the same script exactly
- Looking for
- a real person, which sounds like a low bar and is apparently not
- Experience
- Nine years, two dynamics, one of them long.
- Around
- the east, Amsterdam
Three times this year I have had the same conversation with three different accounts. Warm, fast, flattering, a photograph offered unprompted, and then somewhere around day four an emergency that only I could solve. Same rhythm, same phrasing in places, almost certainly the same person or the same manual.
I mention it because the advice everybody gives is to look for the obvious signs, and there were none. The photographs were consistent. The profiles were detailed. What gave it away, all three times, was that none of them would answer a specific question about this city. Ask what a person actually did on Sunday, in a place they claim to live, and the whole thing falls apart in two messages.
Forty three, the east, dominant, nine years in, two dynamics and one of them long enough that people ask me about it.
I am not writing this as a warning post. There are enough of those. I am writing it because it has made me slow and a bit cold at the start, and I would rather explain that in advance than have somebody decent think it is about them.
What I want is an ongoing arrangement, terms agreed properly, a fixed evening, reporting between. Not looking for anybody who moves very fast in week one. Not looking to be flattered. And I will never send anybody anything, so nobody should waste their fourth day on me.