One Last Hurrah for Her

IT consultants are mostly men, eliminating most opportunities to hook up with co-workers. It's much easier to pick up a real estate agent at the hotel bar than try to convince the much-hounded hotties of IT they should bed down with you! But sometimes the cards fall in your favor, with a woman consultant on the hunt for a boy toy!

I was lucky enough to be part of a multi-disciplinary strategy project, including servers, applications, organizational realignment, and even human resources advice. Yeah, you heard that right: We had an HR consultant on our team!

I wasn't sure who they'd get for that role. Our company sure as hell didn't have anyone remotely qualified! But one of the local managers had a friend who'd just retired from a lower VP of HR role at a respected company, so they brought her in for one last hurrah as a consultant.

I had just turned 30, so a recently-retired teammate barely even registered, even though I heard it was a woman. Instead, we all settled on the back tables at the hotel bar, watching baseball before we kicked off our new project. Consultants are known to drink. And considering the nature of the job, we're known to drink well. But nothing could have prepared me for that night!

After a few hours, our new team member arrived. "Lilith" was hot. There's just no way around that. Even at 60, she was slim and ready for a young stud like me. And this girl could drink: She started by ordering a bottle of red wine, much to the shock of us con-boys!

She immediately zeroed in on me. She plunked down her bottle and glass, looked me in the eye, and began to spill the beans. She wasn't recently retired, so much as fired. Her offense? Boredom. And she was also recently divorced after 35 years. Her offense? Boredom.

She wanted to know what the consultant life was like, so who was I to deny her that? I needed to pick up some new dress shirts anyway (it was a long project) so I offered to take her into the city with me. You never saw anything like the eyes on this bored old dame when a guy half her age offers to take her to Macy's, dinner, and drinks in the big, bad city!

I was young enough not to know what I had my hands on. We had a fantastic night on the town before cabbing back to the hotel. I was even too naive to understand why she needed me to carry her bags back to her room! But it didn't take long to figure out what she had in store once the door closed.

We didn't see each other again after that week. It turned out she was fired for incompetence as well as boredom, and even a consultant needs to show some capacity to produce deliverables. I hear she retired for good the next week, not needing the money or work anymore. I also hear she shocked her friend by shacking up with a young stud there half her age. Who saw that coming?

She reached out once, letting me know how much she enjoyed our night out and making sure I was ok with it. A class act!