The meal thing

It's nice to see there are other folks out there who avoid biz breakfasts, lunches and by all means, dinners. I routinely get emails and calls from complete strangers asking if we can get together for a "get acquainted" lunch. Or sometimes they'll want to buy me breakfast or whatever and "pick my brain" (a pretty hopeless exercise since it's been well picked over). NYT columnist Lisa Belkin has a number of suggestions for deflecting these annoying, time-wasting offers, which, by the way, often have less to do with you and more with filling up calendars (and expense accounts).

You can do as Mark Amtower does, and dine only with companions willing to put their money where their mouth is. After tiring of acquaintances inviting him out to shoot the breeze, Mr. Amtower, a business consultant, began charging $600 an hour with a four-hour minimum. “If someone wants to take me to breakfast or lunch and I know all they want to do is pick my brain for free advice, I tell them they have to buy a four-hour block of time,” he said of the policy he adopted in the last few years.

[CUT]

You can use the technique Debra Condren, a career adviser in Manhattan, learned from a guest speaker at a breakfast for women in business. At the end of the speech, women crowded around the speaker, “complimenting her, taking her business card to set up an appointment,” Ms. Condren recalled. “One person hung around until the crowd had thinned and then said, ‘I’d love to have lunch with you and pick your brain.’” With no hesitation or embarrassment, the speaker replied: “I don’t do lunch, except with my family or friends. We have very little time together, so I save down time for them.”