Okay, this one is likely a bit more unrealistic than the Cairo announcement. It’s more of a bizarre story from last week. It was about 5:30 and I was still working away at my desk. I had my headphones on listening to Playdio.se and their crazy Swedish DJs. Out of the corner of my eye, I see this guy walk past my cube.
He turns around and notices me and says something. I’ve got some serious Swedish techno blasting in my ear, so I don’t catch what he’s saying. I hit mute and remove the earbuds. The gentleman was looking for the Lansing Chamber of Commerce, which used to be on the floor above mine. I let him know the Chamber moved a few blocks away before it heads to its new location. Figuring that’s all he needed, I started to turn back to my monitor. Boy, was I wrong.
Turns out, the guy is one of the biggest developers in the Lansing area. And he decided he wants to chat with me I actually first met him awhile ago (been so long I didn’t fully recognize his face), so I knew about his sons attending Minnesota schools like mine. That gave me a few minutes to get into a comfort zone talking with someone I would normally think has no reason to even given the time of day. I then find out why he wanted go to the Chamber. He’s trying to offload a building he owns and was looking for some ideas. Now, he didn’t mention this outright but it was pretty obvious. How? Because he tried getting me to buy it!
Yep, that’s right. I was offered 175,000+ sq. ft. of real estate from a Lansing legend. He was planning on pitching this property to someone and I happened to be it. While I’m fairly certain he was mostly joking, I politely declined. Wowever, he didn’t let up. Did my company want it? Did I know anyone looking for a building? Did I have any ideas for it? He did offer me a “big check” if I helped him get rid of it, but I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to give him a real lead. Just not my mental focus at any point during a typical day. I did throw him a couple ideas for it, which prompted him ask if I could run the place if any of those ideas got setup. Persistent little bugger. Apparently, he does have other possibilities in the works, but he was certainly looking for a backup.
We definitely had an enjoyable and (for me, at least) memorable exchange. Not very often someone like me gets 10 minutes of one-on-one chat time with a local mover and shaker like that. I guess if I anything, I learned that if you have a plan in mind, make sure you follow through with it even if it doesn’t go as expected. I’m pretty sure that’s why I was offered to buy a huge building and I’m equally certain that’s how he got to be so successful.
The Randomness Continues
Still reeling a bit from the exchange with the real estate mogul, I found my way home. I ate dinner with the misses, and headed off for a meeting at church. Things ended early there, so I decided to run down to Barnes & Noble in East Lansing. I had a couple gift cards from my birthday, so I was looking to take advantage of the free “money” before I lost them, as I’ve been known to do. At the store, they announced there was a buy-2-get-1-free sale on all classical music. Before I knew it, I was flipping through CDs. Woohoo!!
With the mad rush that is a classical music sale, there was one other person and the music section employee there. The other customer was a taller guy with a long red ponytail. He started asking the B&N employee some questions about different recordings. Not getting much help, he started directing inquiries my way. It was then that I realized he had quite an Irish accent. Anyway, I was able to answer a few of his questions, which only got him asking more. Even the guy behind the counter started listening and writing stuff down. Again, with just the three of us in the music area, he had nothing better to do.
The Irish bloke turned out to have been recently turned onto classical music, so I certainly wasn’t going lose the rare opportunity to help him pick decent recordings. I’m rather convinced more people would appreciate classical music if they could actually be exposed to great recordings of great works, not all these mediocre versions of obscure works that are often played on public radio. However, that’s a bit beyond the scope of this post. At any rate, we got him all fixed up with some Rachmaninoff piano concertos, some Mahler and (my favorite!) the Herbert von Karajan with Berlin Philharmonic recordings of Brahm’s symphonies.
As we chatted some more, I found out he was in town visiting his adviser from when he worked on his Ph.D. at MSU’s Cyclotron. He even knew a guy I from undergrad class who came to MSU to study nuclear physics. Craziness. That then led to us debating the “coincidentalness” of our meeting. Being that I was taking on a Ph.D. in advanced physics, I somewhat conceded to his argument that it wasn’t a particularly big coincidence. However, had I explained my already coincidental run-in with the Lansing real estate maven, I might have helped my case. In all, we had a fun chat. It was an entertaining end to a rather interesting evening.
Great post–so did the developer get your name? Great things are going to happen!!!
This is bush.. D writes on your blog but not mine. Playing favorites like usual! Bush!
Confucious Say: When real estate big shot offer Big Property to passer-by for nothing but song, Big Shot look to be shot big with holes and maybe listening for Fat Lady singing.