Never let it be said that I don’t commit to things once I decide on a course of action. So in this spirit I decided to kick my search up a notch, both in arena and in intentions. It’s time to look for a few dates. I have a particularly small group of friends here. They are all married with kids. And don’t know any single women. In essence they are useless to me. If nothing else I will meet new people. I decided to try plentyoffish.com
Let me jump off on a side note here.
Has this guy never heard of a graphic designer? I mean, seriously. It’s like the anti-design. If it were an international spy it would be about as far from James Bond as I am. And that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that the thumbnails are all deformed. Everybody ends up looking like they’re at a carnival in the mirror room. This guy makes a FORTUNE off this site. Lets look at some of the stats here
“Every day over 30,000 nurses and doctors, 27,000 educators, 25,000 business owners, 5,000 chefs, 2,000 pilots and 800 Architects use Plentyoffish to find love, and they are joined by nearly 1,000,000 others just like YOU!”
I’m no mathematician, but if you take all those numbers and use one of those new fangled calculating devices, I think you’ll find a that he gets roughly, in the ball park of, a HOJILLION page impressions a second. The site is littered with ads, placed in the most annoying places. Given the laws of stupidity, enough people have to click on those ads to sum up a decent amount of green backs for our man Markus.
HIRE A DESIGNER!
Anywhere, where was I? Yes, so while navigating the infuriating rows of warped images I was surprised to find some normal looking people. And quite a few hot ladies too.
So you register and start to fill out your profile. And here is possibly the most annoying part of this online dating experience. How do I reduce my obviously fantastic character down into a few lines of text on a website? All joking aside, it’s not really a good indication of a person, is it? I spent some time thinking about how best to describe myself, through multiple iterations. The result of each try falls into one of three categories. I’m either an arrogant twit, overly self deprecating or emo.
I eventually settle on a few witty and erudite phrases that should have them eating out of my hands. I try to find a few photos of myself which ends up being harder than I thought, being significantly slimmer than my most recent photographic capture. I snap a few awful shots with my iPhone and upload.
Finally I have completed the course of hoops and I’m ready to begin. Dr. Watson, the game is afoot!
There are an amazingly small number of people in my area. I’ve been keeping an eye on it. I’ve been checked out by all the women in town on plentyoffish. It’s a little oxymoronic.
So you send a mail to a few and you wait. And wait.
And wait.
There’s nothing like being ignored on a website. It’s worse than getting the brush off in a bar. Geeks are the kings of the Internet? Maybe on an Anime site, or a Battlestar Galactica one. On a dating site? Yeah the jocks beat us hands down.
Is nothing sacred?
