Working for your Friend

I have this chronically disorganized, frazzled friend. She once hired a professional organizer and paid her good money to redo her closets.
I have to admit, I find the notion quite odd and subscribe to a different philosophy: you've created the chaos, you clean it up. Same philosophy goes for the dirty bathroom, BTW. It's about self-reliance and being an adult!

Now she's laid her eyes on my very organized, sane, minimalistic self. She asked me if I could help her come up with systems to get organized. At first I thought it'd be fun to give her some tips and cheerfully agreed to her proposition. She even wanted to pay me. I ignored that part of the deal. It seemed somewhat condescending.

So we met for lunch last week. She started telling me about all her problem areas (there are a lot) and I threw in some suggestions e.g.: lose one of the four credit cards, no matter how great a deal they have attached to them, have all your emails forwarded to one account, go paperless, sign up for pre-authorized monthly bill payments, decide for one wireless device and just stick with it,  scratch off those meaningless tasks from your to do list, have only one day planner if you really need one, colour code, and you don't have to buy more supplies in order to get organized... Just common sense suggestions.
She had quite a few objections and we had to discuss in detail. How dull. I'd rather hear her new juicy dating stories or tell her about all my grievances as an unemployed shmuck. But no! We had to weigh the pros and cons of PDFs vs. paper. Snore.

It started to look a lot like she just wants me to make it all go away for her. At one point she proclaimed: "That's why people hire assistants!" Aaaaha! That's when it became crystal clear: she is hoping for a single serving personal assistant (because she wouldn't be able to afford one on a regular basis)!
Oooh no, princess. We're not going there. So I turned the whole project upside down into a counseling session, because I am good at that. I started to speak about "discipline" and  "self-management", "like brushing teeth" and "taking care of yourself".
Of course she wasn't too, too pleased; neither was I.
It was an awkward get-together and I sure hope she'll just forget about the whole thing. If not, she will receive free counseling sessions from me because I am too chicken to do anything else.

*Sigh...*