postings of a professional redhead » xfiles

Reason number 579 I don’t date coworkers

Sidney — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:40:34 +0000

Catherine mentions self-censoring in her latest post, which is something I’ve been thinking about lately due to the fact that I’ve noticed I’m suddenly getting some non-me traffic from where I work. I never use people’s names, however, so I guess I’m OK still bitching about work now and then, right? It’s probably some sort of ex, anyway. It is only a matter of time before people realize I’ve had one username since I was 15 or 16, that I use that very same username on fifteen social networking etc. sites and five different instant messaging platforms, so maybe they should put a dot com on the end of it and see what happens…?

So I’ll segue that right into …

The x-Files, Part 3; or, reason number 579 I don’t date coworkers…

I’m going to explain how this date went with a nice itemized list of observations I made over the course of our date…

Do not spend the first twenty minutes of precious quick coffee date time talking about work. If I want to eat/drink while talking about work, I’ll go to the cafeteria…at work.
Know who you’re taking out. Please do not suddenly realize who my father is in the middle of the date, and suddenly turn bright red when you realize you’re not only taking out your coworker, but your coworker’s daughter.
No, I didn’t care that you were older than me…until you mentioned it about 2,983 times. Really, if this is such an issue, why the hell did you ask me out?
WTF, you’re still married? You’re still living with her? What?
You hate cats? OK – I have two. No, I don’t want to “trade them in for a dog.”
Bux does not have liquor for their coffee, sorry, you’ll have to wait until you get home and have your wife pour you a nice big boozy drink.
Another 20 minutes later and I wish *I* had liquor in my coffee…
Finally extract myself from terrible conversation with standard, “I need to go home and take care of my cats” line. He does not have my cell phone number; I do not give it to him.

So if he asks me out again I’m going to give the standard, “thank you, but this doesn’t really work for me,” line – though if his behaviour today is any indication, I don’t think he’ll be talking to me again anytime soon. He just spent 20 minutes talking to my boss (who sits three feet away from me, seeing as we share half a cubicle) and didn’t even say hello. What an asshole.

The eX-Files, Part 2

Sidney — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:59:24 +0000

I figured this time I would do “worst first dates,” though this one was bad more in the “I’m so mortified” way rather than the “oh my goodness that person was a total freakbag” way.

A few months ago when I was home sick with bronchitis – right after getting over pneumonia – I was browsing around my favorite dating/quiz site when I got a message from a relatively sane-sounding woman. It’s not very often I get messages from 1) women, 2) women over the age of 22, 3) women without boyfriend/husband looking for “fun times,” 4) someone listed as “single,” or 5) anyone who sounds reasonably intelligent, so I gave her my contact info and hoped for the best.

We chatted on the phone for a couple weeks before deciding to have a date. In my infinite wisdom (the wisdom that has caused many a comedy of errors in my life) I invited her to my house for dinner and – don’t laugh – a night of watching “The L Word.” Seriously, it was going to be the lezziest first date EVER.

The night of The Big Dinner I was getting ready by furiously cleaning my messy house before she came over. At about an hour before she was to arrive, I took a quick shower and just threw on pajamas because it gets very hot in my kitchen, and I wanted to wait until I had everything cooking and she was just about to arrive to get dressed. I realized I should put a load of dishes in the dishwasher before starting cooking, so was running around the house gathering up the 20 water glasses I had managed to scatter everywhere when I remembered there were wine glasses on my balcony from having friends over the night before.

I ran out onto my balcony – in a pair of boxer shorts and wife beater – closing the sliding glass door behind me so I wouldn’t have to round the cats up and chase them back inside when I heard a loud *thump* and turned around.

That’s right. The cats had raced after me in the hopes of going outside, and had stopped at the last minute, sliding on my wood floors and pushing the security board into the tracks of my sliding glass door.

I was stranded on my balcony with no cell phone and no clothes on.

And my date was going to arrive at my condo in 45 minutes.

First I looked over the edge to see if I could manage the jump. It’s only about eight feet off the ground (I’m on the first floor, but the building is on a hill and the basement has an entrance right below my balcony) but I figured if I were to jump, I would inevitably twist/break something and then be lying in pain in the mud with no cell phone locked out of my building. So I waited. And waited. And waited. And for the first time since I lived there, half an hour went by with NO ONE either walking through the parking lot, or driving by my balcony. Finally a woman walked by and I tried to call to her that I needed help, but she flicked me off and kept walking…nice.

Finally I see my date pull in – I think to myself, awesome! there is a parking spot RIGHT BELOW ME she will have to walk by and I can tell her to go grab my neighbor and have her let me in. Does she park in that first, easily-accessible parking spot? No. She drives all the way around the building to park on the total opposite side from where I am standing – and does not see my waving my broom around trying to grab her attention.

At this point, I realized I was hosed. I could hear her buzzing my unit, and then I heard my cell phone ringing, and I really didn’t want her to think I had just stood her up like that (at my house, no less!) so I climbed over the railing and jumped off the damn balcony.

And landed in a giant puddle of mud, right on my ass.

Her first impression of me? Boxer shorts, wife beater, out of breath, covered in mud, talking quickly explaining what happened as I led her to my neighbor’s house to flag her down and let us in the building.

Thank goodness my condo door wasn’t locked.

The eX-Files, Part 1

Sidney — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:32:40 +0000

Inspired in part by a recent conversation about best and worst first dates and a random tweet about waterfalls, I thought it might be interesting to blog about some of the first dates I have experienced. So begins this series of blog postings entitled “The eX-Files.” I will be calling everyone either by A) the nickname I gave them when we dated, or B) the nickname they earned after we stopped dating.

First up is Mr. T. He will be called “Mr. T” for the purposes of this blog because, well…when he dressed up as Mr. T for Halloween one year, he could have hired himself out as an impersonator it was such a fantastic imitation. Mr. T and I met at a party of a mutual friend. He is probably the cutest hunk of manly I have ever seen, and is ridiculously cocky to boot – cockiness being one of my favorite character traits in a man (no, really, I’m not being sarcastic). I went to the party with a friend who was was making it very hard for him to talk to me – mostly because at Smyff we assume all men are sketchy until evidence to the contrary is provided, and we tend to be very protective of our friends during the initial “are you or aren’t you one sketchy-ass motherfucker” period of inquisition.

I ended up leaving the party early, but gave him my number before I left – something I hardly ever do – and I never thought he would call me. Not only did he call me, but he did so later on that same night! He complained that he hadn’t had enough chance to talk to me because I was there with “the best cockblocking wingman on the face of the planet,” and still today remembers fondly the hard time she gave him when we first met.

T and I ended up talking on the phone until the wee hours of the night, something that became somewhat of a habit with us. We ended up going on our first date after a lengthy period of phone flirtation – which, as far as I know, is much better than chatting online. We liked each other enough that we decided to try for “best first date ever” and combined one of my favorite activities with one of his favorite activities – which is how we ended up going swimming/jumping in the freezing cold waterfall in Northampton, MA in October…followed by finger-licking Southern-style BBQ. I really didn’t think the waterfall would have cooled off so much since I had been in August, but it had and was so cold when i jumped in I thought I was going to die.

It turned out we were both cocky show-offs and each was trying to impress the other, so we ended up braving that freezing water for a nipply hour before finally calling mutual uncle and going for THE BEST Southern BBQ I had eaten since leaving FL – and the best HE had eaten since leaving Georgia. It’s very rare that folks in New England actually know how to properly cook greens – I’ve experienced limp/nasty greens even at really hoity-toity over-priced restaurants in West Hartford.

He and I are still very close – even though he’s back in Georgia, I visited him a few months ago for his birthday (hosted in a microbrewery), and we’re planning a two-week vacation to München, Germany/Belgium/etc. for the 200th anniversary of Oktoberfest in 2010. One of the things we always have agreed on is the importance of good beer – you know, all relationships need a strong foundation…and we both desperately want to go to the Trappist Abbeys.