It's Friday night and I'm sitting in my favorite secret hideaway coffee shop drinking a 16oz cup of hot ginger tea in an attempt to remedy the nausea brought about by tonight's date.
Just so you know, I never have blogged about nice men, the ones who are considerate, but whose values, or ideas, or interests, just aren't a good match by their own account or mine. Those men never deserve ridicule.
Then there are dates like the one I had tonight: the horrendously conniving and potently odoriferous first date who wastes my time.
So I'm sitting at a little table in
St. Honore, cradling a cup of Earl Grey tea, watching the minutes tick by. Ten minutes late. Twenty minutes late. Thirty minutes late. "Whatever," I thought. "Game over. I'm out of here." Usually I'm out the door if a man is 15 minutes late without a phone call.
Just as I'm gathering my things to leave he comes strolling in the door and sits across from me at the table.
"Why are you so late?" I asked.
"Traffic was bad," he said. "I had to come all the way from Sellwood."
"Maybe you should plan accordingly," I said.
I was struggling not to just get up and walk out the door. I kept thinking about how some people seem to think I'm too picky or that my standards of acceptable behavior are too high.
"After all you've done the least I can do is buy you dinner," he said.
"What exactly have I done?" I asked. "I don't even know you."
I met the guy for the first time last week at a networking event I attended with a coworker. We had exchanged business cards and he emailed me the next day to ask me out. I accepted.
So, out of sheer curiosity, and since I had nowhere else to be at the moment, I figured I'd give the man 20 minutes. That was a mistake that I won't make again.
"You sure were late," I said. "Did you come straight from work?"
"No, I didn't work today," he said.
"Oh, do you have Fridays off or did you just have this Friday off?" I asked.
"Actually, I don't work."
"What? But you gave me your business card. You have a website that lists you as being the owner of your own accounting firm and the sole accountant for SeQuential Biofuels and about four other big local companies."
"Yeah, that card isn't good anymore," he said without any hint of embarrassment. "I only helped out with a couple of consulting jobs when I was a student. I just graduated with an accounting degree."
The guy was a complete fraud!
This information was rather surprising since he appeared to be in his late 30s/early 40s. It was also surprising that I kept getting these potent whiffs of horrendous B.O. that I assumed were coming from the couple behind him.
"Are you kidding me," I said. "So you gave me a fake card. Why were you even at that event?"
Another whiff of B.O. gust past me, nearly knocking me over as I covered my nose in horror. Thankfully, the couple was vacating their table.
"Oh, a friend invited me," he said with no hint of shame. "I've been networking hard to find employment and am making lots of progress. It's a beautiful thing. Just a real beautiful thing. I am blessed. I'm looking for a company with a culture that I can ease into and take over their accounting practices - and here you are."
Then it hit me - both the realization that the B.O. was still coming in gusts even though the couple that I thought was producing it had left, and that he was trying to weasel his way into a job with my company.
"We aren't hiring," I said. "If you're looking for work then I can't help you."
"Maybe not now, but in the near future, maybe we can arrange something," he said.
WTF!!!
"I don't think so," I said. I was coughing and covering my nose since he had lifted his arms and was gesturing across the table. I felt like I was totally going to hurl.
I seriously cannot believe that the slimy greasebag was just trying to sleazeball his way into a job!
"But you're pretty much executive management," he said becoming even more animated as my gagging reflex began to kick in. "It's pretty obvious."
"Not really," I said as I gathered up my things. "You have no clue what I do. Good luck to you."
"Wait!" he said as I bolted out for fresh air. "I brought a bag of chocolate to share with you! I didn't even eat my wild chocolate ration today!"
WTF is wild chocolate? Chocolate that roams free through the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest?
"No thanks!" I said over my shoulder as I sprinted across the street away from St. Honore. He had a wadded up, old brown paper bag in his hand, which presumably contained the chocolate.
I fell for the chocolate in a battered up brown paper bag trick a couple of years ago and it will never happen again. In that instance, I went on a date the weekend before Valentine's Day and my date showed up with a dusty, wadded up bag of chocolate for me. "Uh, thank you," I had said, and when I checked the labels I saw that every bar of chocolate expired more than 2 years earlier!
So here I sit now, nauseous, the remnants of offending body odor still wafting through my nostrils. I was walking all the way to the coffee shop trying to shake it all off. Bleh! Gross! Ugh! I'm going home now to take a long hot shower and pull out every drop of aromatherapy oils I have stashed around my apartment.
Some dates just stink.
