Lesson: Laugh it Off
Work in the mining industry definitely takes you to interesting places, and I would like to think the bar I ended up in Geneva, Switzerland, had nothing to do with mining. I just ended up there because I was marketing a company. Little did I know!
After a day of presentations and a group dinner, we all decided a night cap would be in order and someone suggested a certain bar in Geneva, the city we all found ourselves in for presentations. I know it all sounds glamorous, but marketing trips are brutal – it’s a country a day usually by train or sometimes air. You arrive in the evening, eat, sleep, get up, eat, present and then hit the train station/airport, head to the hotel, rinse and repeat. By day 5 I am grumpy.
But in Geneva, not day 5, we were over the jet lag and the grumpy stage of hauling luggage around had not hit so off I went with the group for a night cap.
Once in the bar we ordered drinks which arrived quickly. We were a large group of about 10, mixed crowd which oddly included 3 couples. My friend, Anne, was the first to comment when she mentioned she could barely afford the $20 diet coke. Interesting bar we all thought, then I looked around.
Sitting with the women in our group, four of us, I leaned all in and quietly mentioned that I think we are the only women here that aren’t working girls. The four of us looked around, and then looked back at each other. All nodded.
We were in a very high-end hooker bar, surrounded by extremely good-looking women from foreign locations. Over at one table it was clear the client did not want tall leggy brunettes, who were being shuffled off, and replaced by tall leggy blondes almost immediately. And so it went, from table to table, and back at the bar counter where terms were being negotiated.
We laughed watching the antics, letting the rest of our group in on the scene. To this day my husband and I still laugh about the evening in the hooker bar, which really only lasted for one very expensive drink. And to this day he is happy he wasn’t the one who recommended the bar.
