Is it that hard for someone not to go off the rails there?
The guy I will meet today is young and although I've only briefly spoken to him, I gather he's been on holiday here and is returning to live with the girl/boy he met here.
You have a lot of older guys that do the same thing - mostly retirees. The younger one's mostly end up as school teachers. The older ones become sugar-daddies.
So it becomes sort of an extension of your holiday. Plus if you are young, you are literally a pussy magnet but none of it is real.
If the gal they came back to is a "bar girl" - these girls are used to partying every night. Despite Thailand being hard on drugs, you can get anything here and usually pretty quickly.
So there you are, a pussy magnet, most likely with a party girl, away from home with nobody to slow you down and tell you to ease off. It's not real. It's like Disneyworld for sex, booze & drug addicts.
Plus the fact is - most of the working girls here are married or have Thai boyfriends, so they fake a relationship with you to extract as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. I don't just mean a few thousand either - I know men that have brought houses in their girlfriends name and once signed, the girl move their Thai boyfriend in and never let them move in.That's enough to break most men.
When I came here, I was contracting in Japan and they sent me here to oversee an implementation in a Hard Disk Factory. I was about 27, I worked for 6 weeks and decided not to go back to Japan (on account of working there is like being in Boot Camp) then someone who was going to open a company the following year paid me contract rates for 6 months to stay here and NOT work, so that I could head up the tech side of his new firm. How I survived that I don't know but basically I saw a lot of shells on bar stools and even on my first day here I saw older guys and I thought "fuck, I hope I never end up like that".
If he had the balls to speak to you drunk....he is likely doing it to your business lines and that's my take.
Can you afford the reputational damage?
Unless you can come up with a solution to control it....better off cutting it...what's wrong with drinking on weekends.
Good point and thus far there hasn't been any and there are plenty of channels where views are aired on the company.
When he called me he said "look, to be honest I've had a few beers but we can have our meeting anyway". "had a few beers" = totally shitfaced. So my gut feel is he's not done this with the partners yet. For sure, he's building relationships and I've not heard complaints but I am going to do what Princess said and throw a few people I know into the mix and have him call them and get their feedback.
He's got the gift on the phone, plus he can get past the 'gatekeepers', that's a relatively rare skill.
This is a small company and he's the only guy doing this stuff so right now, I have to risk having him carry on in the short term.
If it was a bigger company with multiple people doing the same thing it'd be fine but it is what it is....
We are currently in the process of seeking funding for our next generation product, part of that plan is to intentionally take our eyes of the ball so to speak in terms of keeping sales of the current product up. So if that happens, this all becomes a non-issue because we could effectively back off marketing for 6 months.
