I’ve been going to a bunch of biz dev meetings of late, with people I’ve previously only met via email. And, inevitably, just before such meetings, I end up standing at the front of the restaurant or coffee shop, looking at each middle aged man coming in the door, trying to divine whether he looks like a DVD distributor, casting director or foreign sales agent I’d be meeting.

Ninety percent of the time, oddly, I get it right. Oh, I think. Of course he’s the guy I’m meeting. But the other ten percent, I don’t have a clue. So, five or ten minutes after the appointed hour, I start asking anyone standing around, from most likely candidate to least, whether they’re Bob or Ted or Chris. Usually, I don’t get it right until the fifth or sixth ask. And, on each I get wrong, the guy who isn’t Bob or Ted or Chris quickly and vigorously explains that I’ve most definitely got the wrong guy. It took me a while to realize, from the weird face they also give me at the time, that they’re assuming I’m not looking for a potential business partnership, but rather for a discreet tryst with an older sugar daddy I’ve met somehow on Craig’s List.

Just one of the many dangerous side effects, it seems, of dressing filmmaker-hip business casual.