Quote:
I've got this buddy of mine who can come up with openers fairly easily, but he has a difficult time trying them out unless he knows they work!
If he won't use an opener unless he knows it "works", why haven't you challenged him about why this is instead of handing shit to him? If you do that, he's just gonna start giving you shit about everything else after that. Then he's gonna complain if something doesn't work for him and blame you.
Ask him what an opener is designed to do and get him to realise that he's thinking about this all wrong. An opener is designed to start a conversation. That's it. He seems to be operating under the influence that a "good" opener defines the outcome of the interaction as a whole, and he needs to snap out of it - pronto. He thinks that this is all some magic pill that if you just say the right stuff and in the right order that everything is gonna just fall into place and work out. The guy has a
lot of stuff to realise.
Good luck with him. You should really get him to sign up here, cos by the sounds of it he's gonna frustrate the ever-loving shit outta you before too long.