I was having dinner at Sevva the other night and met this chap who works for a US bulge bracket firm. For the sake of good form I won’t say at which one, but it shouldn’t be that hard to guess. The reason for that is because Mickey (not his real name) was trying so hard to impress me that he started talking about all the exotic places he had travelled to, to originate deals.
For someone of his tender age, I guess it is quite a feat to have visited the likes of Colombo, Hanoi and Phnom Penh after not long in your role. And to be fair, he had just the right amount of humour mixed into his storytelling, so I was quite entertained.
But the poor chap really got it wrong when he started talking about something that was really beyond him.
Fuelled by a couple of whiskies, he shared his two cents on Sri Lanka and how the country could learn a thing or two from some of the others he had visited. It might have been just about OK if he had stopped there, but no, he then launched into a diatribe against a country he has only visited twice in his life.
I'd had enough, and resolved to leave him to his own ranting, but not before sharing my own nugget of information — that I happen to know Sri Lanka better than most, having owned several tea plantations there since the 1980s.
I leave you to imagine the look on his face. This old dog still has a few tricks up his sleeve.