the next facebook

5:00 pm.  I get a phone call from a woman who posted an ad on Craig’s List last week, looking for someone to help her promote her new website. I’m excited that she responded to my resume.

5:30 pm.  She’s telling me a long story about her traumatic time in the hospital and how it led her to a new outlook on life, and motivated her to start her own company.

5:45 pm.  What she really wants, she says, is for her site to get a mention on the Today show. Do I think I can make that happen?

6:00 pm. While we’re still on the phone, she emails me a login to see the site in beta. It looks like it was designed in 1995 for $250. I start looking for ways out of the conversation.

6:15 pm. I’m directly telling her that the concept is undefined, the design is bad, and most of the features are already available elsewhere. She’s asking me for advice on how to improve things. I tell her that I wish we had met a year or two ago, so that I could have been involved in the initial planning and conceptualizing. “I’m really just not on board with this,” I tell her.

6:30 pm. With the promise that I will show the site to a quality designer and get his assessment and the phrase “I’m not interested,” she finally seems willing to end the call. I beat myself up a bit for not just saying “I’m not interested” and hanging up at 5:30.

6:40 pm. I email the login to my designer friend, but in the middle of the email, but find myself writing a pre-emptive apology in the body of the email for even implying that he might be interested.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” I lied at one point during the phone call. “Maybe this is going to be huge, and I’ll see it on the news, and I’ll feel bad.”

“I don’t want you to feel bad,” she said, which was nice of her, but not effective.