[quote=spdrun]How long had he known the client? I wouldn’t get too friendly on the first day, but I’m on friendly terms with quite a few clients. Went to a concert 300 miles away with one, dated two others at various points.
I personally don’t use the term “dude”, but it’s not horribly offensive either — one of the aforementioned people used that term quite a bit. Professional distance is great, but you spend 1/3 of your waking life at work, so you’re bound to meet interesting people.[/quote]
I’m in the blast engineering business. I bring that up because we deal with an extremely sensitive part of any client’s business, either for accidental blast (think oil refinery) or Force Protection (think anti-terrorism).
In this case, this was a longtime client and the engineer in question was a freshly minted MS out of a good UC school. He was only there because our senior engineers were tied down on an emergency project. I instructed him to limit his answers and be respectful of the client rep, who was the COO and responsible for their entire risk management portfolio. Guy was in his 50s and fortunately had a good sense of humor. He caught me rolling my eyes heaven ward and told me not to sweat it. It took me a surprising amount of time, post-meeting, to explain that that level of familiarity was completely unacceptable.
There are times when I feel really old (and old-fashioned) and I’m not even 50 yet.
