[tuq]

TomE, good stuff, although I'm not sure why you fessed up to hitting the dog in the first place...

Best examples I can come up with: a few years ago a friend was getting married at a non-denominational "event house". It was this large property with a front yard, back yard w/pool, and common house. Nice house but on this day it was generally only utilized for its bathrooms. In this case we had a front yard wedding, but there was also a back yard wedding. It went off ~1 hour before ours did. Both weddings shared the same bathroom.

I couldn't help but notice that our wedding was beer and wine only (not even a cash bar for the hard stuff), whereas the other wedding was a full open bar.

Pretty early on I determined that we were gonna crash this other bar. After our ceremony I tipped one of their bartenders $20 to have my run of the place. He kept me in drinks and by the end of the night about a half of our wedding had crashed their party and for all intents and purposes we had melded into one big party.

More interesting though, one of the invitees of this other wedding was a childhood friend who recognized me but who I hadn't seen in at least twenty years. Even more bizarre, a member of the wedding party was a friend of mine who I saw daily at the gym. He not only cosigned my drinking at the bar, he convinced me to sign the guest book and cut in line to give me cake.

The best thing that came of this though was that as of a result of the networking at the other wedding I placed a guy in a new job just a few months later and we all made money on the deal.

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Not long after that I was leaving a notoriously debaucherous pool party when I looked at the pool and saw a chick with her top off, perched on her new fake breasts, which were bobbing on the pool surface.

Rather than leave, I sat down to enjoy this sight some more. I got to talking to a couple of other guys enjoying the scenery and got to talking. One of them worked at a client of mine, I got to know him, got his resume and a couple of referrals, and ended up placing multiple people as a result of getting to know this guy.