What a Pitch

Submitted by Andrew:

I'm a producer at a cable channel in a large city.  I had information similar to that statement in my online profile, and Nicole messaged me one day.  She came off as very nice and very creative, hinting that she was an aspiring writer.  We had a great few exchanges, and then she asked me if we could meet up.

We arranged our date and met up at a pub in the middle of town.  She showed up with a dozen scripts and show ideas, and she was ready to pitch them to me for inclusion on the network for which I work.

"Would you mind if I picked your brain?" were her exact words.

I told her that I'd be glad to take a look at a few of her ideas out of courtesy, but that I wasn't allowed to accept unsolicited queries for the channel, and that I didn't want most of the date to be a pitch meeting.  I had enough of those at work!

So she went on in great detail about her idea for a "children's show with attitude," about an alien who comes to earth to sell paper cups but is shooed away by people until he meets a squirrel/mongoose with a massive brood who wants revenge on humanity for lab experiments but then one (or both?) of them fall in love with a human who is an artist but also has secret world domination aspirations, and...

I gave her a few ideas on how to tighten it up, and then she went right into her next pitch without even so much as a thank you.  This next one was about a cockroach that walked on two legs that had a problem in which it would grow and grow and grow.  It lived in a housing complex in a low-income neighborhood and owned several small businesses.  This idea, by the way, she pitched as live action, as opposed to animated.

At this point, I tried to steer the conversation away from pitching.  After all, it was my hope that she was on the date to learn more about me, not to shove her foot in the door... but that's all it really turned out to be.  Whenever I talked about my non-job hobbies, she didn't seem too interested, and even when I asked her ab out herself, she answered anything non-pitch-related with something short and went back into, "So, do you think the roach thing is a good idea?  What would make it better?  When can it be on your channel?"

I was tired of talking with her after a short while, and brought the date to an end after a couple of drinks (my treat, and she never thanked me).

She contacted me the next day to ask if we could go out again and told me that I was a tremendous help to her.  I told her that I didn't think that we were going to work out, and she became really upset and threatened to sue me if I stole her ideas.  I told her that I wouldn't be stealing her ideas, and she hit back with, "Oh, so now you're saying they're not good enough?"

I said, "Yes.  That's exactly what I'm saying.  Bye," and hung up.