What an atrocious night for a date. Why the hell would anyone ever agree to go out on a first date on a Friday night? It's the most exciting night of the week for people with grown-up jobs. For those that remember how to pull in the real world, it's the best night of the week for that. Why sacrifice it for a potentially disastrous and socially awkward evening with a stranger that you've only seen up to about six frames of?
Well I don't know the answer to those questions, but thanks to the Tindernet, there are plenty of people that would love to ruin the beginning of their two day weekly holiday.
Tinder is known for its' array of people with incredibly odd names. Tonight, I've managed to entice out a young lady called Mah. She eventually replied to my opening message. I said:
It'd really make my day if you could reply to me twice, saying the word 'Na'.
That'd mean that the conversation would read:
Mah: Na
Mah: Na
However, she didn't reply with the response that I required from my opening message. She clearly isn't a fan of The Muppets. Either that or she thinks I'm insane. Or an idiot.
We decided to meet in Soho, which is an incredibly noisy and date un-friendly part of central London - especially on the eve of a two day weekly holiday.
I turned up to a bar packed full of excitable Friday people, who were hindering my ability to make a positive identification. Also, the array of bodies in the place made me all hot and sweaty - two things that I've found out that women are not keen on.
Before I could deal with those issues, Mah made a positive identification. As I was desperately uncomfortable about my current temperature, I refrained from too much eye contact, thinking to myself, 'If I can't see her, then she can't see me.' You see? It's not really you at all - it's us.
After years of a career in sound editing, I've become a little bit hard of hearing, but I'm just about too young to admit my slight affliction of not being able to hear in noisy pubs.
Four repeated sentences seemed to agitate Mah, so I then decided to nod and smile, pretending I was totally on top of every inch of conversation that was flowing from her side. This too was agitating the poor woman.
I suggested that we went outside, but within a minute, an employee from the bar had berated us for not having plastic glasses for outside. Mah took umbrage at me for this intervention and suggested that we promptly left this establishment for somewhere else.
She seemed very abrupt and intolerant of the partially deaf, so I felt that I really should have had a 'Plan B' up my sleeve. I had nothing. My mind was blank.
With Mah walking three to four paces in front of me, we just drifted from packed bar to packed bar until I mustered up a crappy old mans' pub near Leicester Square that smelt of cheap burgers and piss. She did not seem happy about this. At least there were seats though.
Even though the volume of the generic bar atmosphere was at a much more manageable amplitude and there was a total lack of music, I had somehow developed an involuntary selective deafness to any words that passed Mahs' lips.
Whatever she said to me, I found myself saying 'Pardon' up to three times in a row. This was visibly bringing her to boiling point. I had become totally scared of this girl and my brain was trying so hard to hear her that it had become incapable of doing so.
'Are you doing this on purpose?' she said.
'What?' I said.
And that was the straw that broke the camels' back.