Matchmakers 2.0 (A Novel Nibbles title) Page 2

  My first couple of times in the contest, I’d spent hours trolling our database trying to match my ten. The first time, I’d cracked the top twenty, not bad for a company with almost a hundred employees. The second time, I’d been fifty-third, and the contest had been won by a guy who threw darts at a wall to pick his matches.

  Since then, I’ve tried to come up with various shortcut strategies. Kind of like using mascots or jersey colors to pick your March Madness brackets. Yeah, I’m a bit of a college basketball nut, too. You’d think that would help on the dating front, but in the Triangle, cheering for the wrong team is a deal breaker. Not everyone’s as big a Wolfpack fan as I am.

  One contest, I did the matches based on height, weight, and shoe size. I was pretty depressed about my job at the time. Another time, I hooked up people whose names started with the same letter.

  Last Match the Loser, I tried to use my education, hooking people up based on whether they’d make cute babies together. Don’t laugh; it’s how most of the animal kingdom chooses a mate. I fed my list and some possible matches into this tool I downloaded from MakeMeBabies.com. You can find anything on the Internet. I took the predicted baby faces on a visit to my granny and her friends in her seniors’ complex and had them vote on the cutest ones.

  I finished second. To Miri. My strategy this time was going to be getting her drunk enough to admit how she does it.

  I tried to convince senior management of the science behind my second-place approach. They wouldn’t even consider it. To quote our head psychologist, “People aren’t nearly as constrained by their biology as fish, sweetheart”. She hired me, so she knows I studied guppies. Shoots my internal credibility all to hell. The PR person was the kiss of death, though. “It would hardly be politically correct to use that, even if it were true.”

  We ask guys for their most desirable breast size in a partner. I have no idea how that one got past the political-correctness squad. Take comfort, all ye women; only eighty-six percent of men answer ‘big’ or ‘really big’.

  We don’t ask women about desirable penis size in a partner. That would be politically incorrect.

  I saw the contest email hit my inbox. There would be no productive work done at MatchMakers for the rest of the day, or the rest of the week, for that matter. It was impossible to get something through Legal or Marketing during the week we had to match our people. Even the tech-support team went AWOL. It was not a good week to download a virus or accidently drop your laptop in the toilet. Ask me how I know.

  Vowing to keep my laptop away from all bodies of water this year, I opened my list. I didn’t recognize any of the names; that was probably a good thing. I knew all of the old-timers. The head of Marketing let out I groan I could hear all the way down the hall. Ha. Derrick must have given him Bella. She’s been with us eight years. No one will ever win with Bella on their list.

  I also had an email from Jazie. No content, just the subject line—Fill It Out.

  Sigh. I pulled up the profile questionnaire and began entering myself as client number 163,482 in the MatchMakers’ system.

  The questions are a cross between a sorority hazing and the SATs. They mostly suck. I didn’t upload a picture. No reason to flag to every MatchMakers’ employee on earth that I was now officially desperate. I wouldn’t normally get automatic system matches until I put up a photo, but as head of the match team, I can override the system. It’s a heady kind of power. Well, not really, but useful in this case. No way did I want this to go public at work.

  Derrick slunk into my office. That’s an occasion; he usually only visits voluntarily a couple of times a year. We spend most of the day together in the match workroom, but my office is my turf.

  Not only did he slink, but he was fidgeting. Derrick never fidgets. “Hey, Mick.”

  I waited for the point of his visit. Silence. “What can I do for you, Derrick? Need help with the contest?” Not likely. The contest was Derrick’s chance to show off his complex-math modeling skills. He lived in hope that one day he would write the new MatchMakers’ web 2.0 algorithm. He’d never survive the politically-correct police.

  Now he was blushing. “I see you put yourself into the system.”

  Anonymously, I’d thought. “What are you, a mind reader?”

  Derrick blushed some more. “I had an SSN flag set, so I’d know if you ever entered yourself.”

  Crap. The system requires a social security number to start a profile. “I lost a bet with a friend. Do me a favor and keep it quiet, will you?” Not that Derrick actually talked to anyone at the office.

  “I wasn’t flagging you so that I could tell anyone. I was hoping…” Derrick kind of stuttered to a halt.

  He might be socially clueless, but I’m not. Oh shit. This wasn’t going to end well. Better to not let it get started. “Can’t, Derrick—we work together. I’m your boss. It’d be way against company policy.”

  It was a really pathetic cop-out, but the best I had on short notice. Damn, Derrick wanted a girlfriend? That implied Derrick knew girls existed, which Miri and I had long debated. I’d hired him for his skills with data, not his social savvy.

  However, that reminded me. I dug around on my desk, about to violate all kinds of company policies in order to end the uncomfortable silence. Pulling out a résumé, I handed it to Derrick. “Give this woman Lily a call. Seriously, I think you’d like her.”

  Derrick frowned at the résumé. “You’re hiring another data analyst?”

  “Not for us. Marketing asked me to interview her. She’d be part of their team.”

  “So, why do you want me to call her?”

  Sigh. Total social moron, but after almost three years of working together, he’d grown on me. “For a date, Derrick. Consider me your personal matchmaking service.”

  My good deed for the day done, I finished my MatchMakers’ profile and hit submit. My computer screen flashed hearts doing a happy dance and told me I would have some suggested matches in just a few hours. Oh joy.

  Chapter 4

  My computer at home had been more than happy to let me know I had date requests from two possible matches. At least it skipped the dancing hearts.

  One of the requests had been from a guy named Chris. He invited me to come to his band gig at the Pinhook and hook up for a drink afterward. They were playing tonight; he apologized for the short notice.

  Since I have no life, and I like the Pinhook, I decided to drop by. If the date really sucked, there was always Ms. Pac-Man.

  I sat out on the back patio for a while and had what passed for food at most bars. It was a nice night, warm enough to enjoy being outside. I like being outside even in crappy weather, but nachos are better when they’re not getting rained on.

  The music from Chris’s band got a little louder every time someone went through the door to the patio. My musical tastes run the direction of the Indigo Girls and Dixie Chicks. Chris’s band was most definitely not the Chicks. It had a bit more of the bash-your-head-inside-a-garbage-can type of vibe going on. Like bagpipes, it wasn’t too bad from far away.

  Derrick says musical compatibility isn’t a big predictor of match success, so I tried to keep an open mind. Okay, mostly I tried to tune out the music.

  To distract myself, I watched the other people on the patio. I like watching people. When you’re in a bar, that means watching the strange mating rituals of the human species. They’re not as different from guppies as you might think.

  A couple sat at a table to my left. Definitely their first date. The woman, co-ed cute, flipped her hair a lot and made sure her left side was toward the guy at all times.

  Guppies do this, too—not the hair thing, but the showing off their best side thing. I know, it’s very weird to watch people on a date and compare them to fish. I can’t help myself. If people wouldn’t behave so much like fish, it would be easier to stop.

  Of course, there are some differences. Guppy parents often eat their babies.

  A group of guys sat c
lose to the door, eyeing all the women that came out. I don’t know why so many guys hunt in packs. Learn from biology—alpha males don’t usually share.

  The alpha guy in this pack was the one wearing the most bling. Think peacocks. Sadly, bling sells, particularly if it looks expensive. I read a study where they sent guys into bars wearing cheap watches, and then wearing expensive watches. You wear the Rolex, you get the girl more often. I hate studies like that. I don’t want to think my gender is that shallow.

  Or maybe guys wearing Rolexes feel more confident and don’t screw up their pick-up lines. It’s so hard to know. In my brief career as a scientific researcher, I learned that most science is way more open to interpretation than they want you to think.

  This is why I’m still single. I sit in a hip bar on a warm spring night and think about guppies and scientific validity. If I’d pulled out my knitting needles, I would have achieved the date-killer trifecta.

  The next time the door opened, it sounded like the band was wrapping up. Taking that as my cue, I headed inside to find Chris. It shouldn’t be that hard. He said he’d be the guy with the guitar.

  There were three guys with guitars. One of them waved me over to their stretch of bar. He was cute, in a head-in-a-garbage-can kind of way.

  I wandered my way over. “Are you Chris? I’m Mick.”

  “Hey, glad you could make it. Have a seat. Joey, move over.”

  Joey, guitar guy number two, slid over towards nameless guitar guy number three, revealing one of the two bar stools that had been under his butt. I sat down between Chris and Joey and waited for the other two guys to get lost.

  Chris handed me a beer. “That’s Joey and Nate. Tell me about yourself, Mick.”

  I remembered why I hate first dates. There were no good answers to that kind of question, particularly when you spent most of your life knitting and setting people up on blind dates. “Well, I’ve lived here in Durham for three years. I do quite a bit of yoga, and I thought your music was cool.”

  Three heads nodded. Apparently, that was an acceptable answer.

  Nate, guitar guy number three, spoke up. “Yoga’s cool. Can you put your feet behind your head?”

  Weird meter going off. I tried to cut him some slack. Maybe he just sucked at first dates, too. However, this wasn’t his date. “Not so much. My instructor’s pretty flexible, but she does a lot more yoga than I do.”

  “Cool. Do you happen to have her number?”

  Chris was obviously alpha male for a reason. Nate would scare off all the women too quickly. Chris passed Nate a beer and regained conversational control. “So, you liked our music?”

  “It was interesting. Different than a lot of stuff here at the Pinhook.” Somebody, new topic of conversation, please. Anybody?

  “The crowd didn’t seem that into us. What do you think, were they digging our stuff?” Great, an insecure musician. Maybe that’s why his two buddies were still on standby.

  “Well, I was mostly listening from outside, but people on the patio seemed into it. Maybe this is just a quieter bar than you usually play for.”

  Chris got waylaid by a fan, bless her. As they bonded, Joey leaned my way and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Hey, when things don’t work out between you and Chris, give me a call. He goes through the ladies pretty fast. I don’t mind leftovers.”

  Joey must have taken my silence for some kind of agreement. “Or if you’re interested, we don’t mind sharing, either.”

  Weird-meter red alert! Move quickly to the nearest exit. Thank you so much, MatchMakers.

  So far, all Chris had was my email, and it was going to stay that way. His fan group had added a couple of groupies, so I didn’t even say good-bye. That much I could do via email.

  I reminded myself on the way out to set the ‘kinky’ flag in Chris’s profile. Since we didn’t have a ‘disgusting’ flag, ‘kinky’ would have to do.

  Chapter 5

  “Penny here says she outweighed her date by thirty pounds.” Norma looked over her glasses and frowned. Norma hated customer service complaints. We all hated the weekly meeting where Norma read them to us.

  “She has made specific requests in the past to be matched with larger men. Team, it’s very important that we support the self-esteem of our clients. Who can tell me how we can learn from Penny’s experience?”

  Derrick, Miri, and I looked at each other. We had an unwritten rule where we rotated dealing with Norma. It was Derrick’s turn to take one for the team.

  He tried. “As you know, statistically, women tend to under-report their weight, and men tend to over-report.” Which is geek speak for everyone being in denial, just in different directions. He clicked a button and sent a screenshot to the big monitor at the front of the room.

  “Penny says she weighs 140 pounds. She also says she’s twenty-eight. As you can see from her driver’s license photo history, both those numbers were true about ten years ago.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Clients lying about their personal data got us off the hook. Usually.

  Unfortunately, Norma was no lightweight, and apparently she had some empathy for those who fudged their physical descriptions by ridiculous amounts. “Perhaps we need to interpret those numbers with a little more latitude.”

  She gave me her leader-to-leader look, the one that said, as the head of the match team, I needed to get things under control.

  Norma is one of the forces to be reckoned with at MatchMakers. She’s the Director of Customer Service, but more importantly, she’s the sister-in-law of the owner. If Norma was unhappy, apparently his golf game suffered. Therefore, unwritten company policy said to keep Norma happy.

  “We’ll figure something out,” I said to Norma. “What’s next on your list?”

  Norma flipped through her paperwork. “This one, from a man named Chris. He thought he’d really hit it off with his first match, and he’s reporting a glitch in our system because she’s no longer on his match list.”

  Shit. That would be because I manually removed him from my match list, but a regular client can’t do that. I hadn’t expected him to complain.

  “I’ll look into it,” I said.

  Derrick looked up in surprise. He always handled glitches in the match system. Not trusting him to understand the pleading in my eyes, I sent him a quick instant message.

  Derrick banged away on his laptop. “I can see the problem, Norma. It looks like the female client sent in a report this morning. Sounds like Chris has some unusual desires that made her uncomfortable. Someone must have adjusted his match list manually.”

  Wow. For Derrick, that was an amazing bit of thinking on his feet.

  Norma managed to look both sympathetic and irritated. She didn’t like kinky clients. They caused all kinds of customer service issues. Fortunately for me, company policy said Chris was now back in her court. I had no idea how Customer Service politely told clients they were a little too kinky for their date. There were definitely worse jobs than mine at MatchMakers.

  Norma looked at the next customer service issue and blushed. Cripes, that meant we had another complaint about sex. Dating service, people—not escort service.

  “Denise is unhappy that we continue to match her with men who don’t share her, umm, desire for frequent intimacy.” We got that complaint all the time, but it usually came from the guys.

  Unfortunately, ‘I like sex often’ does not mean the same thing in man-speak as in woman-speak. Our head psychologist has issues with delving too deeply into the sexual habits of our clients. Well, she just has issues in general, but that’s a different problem. I gave Derrick a break and pulled up Denise’s profile myself.

  Sometimes you just have to laugh, and this was one of those times. Denise was eighty-five. Moving into the seniors’ online-dating market last year had definitely added some wrinkles to our matchmaking.

  I passed my iPad to Norma. She was less amused. Someone didn’t enjoy her Wheaties this morning. Derrick and Miri were tryin
g hard not to snicker.

  Miri managed to find her straight face first. “Not a problem, Norma. We’ll try matching her up with some slightly younger men and see if that helps.”

  Norma dumped her sheaf of papers in my lap and left the room. Meeting over, apparently.

  Derrick looked eager. “I have an idea for tweaking the algorithm on the weight issue.”

  He loved tweaking algorithms. It makes me nervous, ever since the tweak that caused our system to assign everyone matches of the same sex.

  A surprising number of people had good date experiences, but Customer Service nearly exploded. Not everyone had a sense of humor when they discovered their date wasn’t the gender they’d requested. Admittedly, that’s a pretty big match error.

  “No algorithm tweaks, Derrick. It’s Match the Loser week. I don’t want to break anything right now.”

  Derrick scowled. He still blamed our tech team for the same-sex-date fiasco. “Well, I can handle it with a flag, but it won’t be as elegant.”

  Flags are internal to the match department. We use them to identify the non-politically-correct stuff we can’t put in our master database. I was a lot more comfortable messing with those. “Let’s do that. What’s your idea?”

  “I can run a facial comparison between a client’s driver’s license photo and what they submit to us. It won’t be perfect, but it should tell us when their weight data is really off. We can do an age comparison, too. I should have thought of that already.”

  People lying about their height, weight, or age was one of our bigger match headaches. What, you think your date won’t notice you shrunk six inches since you filled out your profile?

  Technically, we weren’t supposed to use driver’s license data, but in a choice between ethics and keeping Norma happy, Norma won, hands down. Derrick got that happy look he gets when craploads of data await his magic touch.