New York EasyDates

I get to work this morning and immediately delete my 3 emails from New York EasyDates instructing me to select my matches from speed dating last night. Yep, I went speed dating. Walking into the bar where the event was held I was completely nervous. The nervousness only intensified when I began taking inventory of my arriving future daters. I don't want to date these guys! My friends and I took a shot and got some beers, walked upstairs to the hostess and retrieved our name tags. Surveying the other names among my Jamie D tag were names like Tara, Kerry, Gaby on the girls' side and Ilya, Rishikesh, Amjad on the guys' side. Crap, I can't even pronounce these names.

Each girl had either a table, a portion of the bar, or a section of a bench and the guys rotated around the room every three minutes. Now, I realize that three minutes is NOT a lot of time to talk to someone, but there were definitely times where my three minute dates felt like three torturous hours. In a few instances I wanted to scream out "NEXT!" or ditch my date to get another drink. I sat on my bench and partook in some of the worst conversations I've ever had.

All the daters asked the same questions. "Where are you from? What do you do? What do you do for fun?" This got really old really fast as I was saying the same things over and over again "I'm from Seattle, Washington. I work for an investment bank. I like to explore New York and try new things." I was a broken record so I started to spice it up with "Have you ever had braces? What's your most embarrassing moment? What's your favorite kind of dog?" This made it a little more fun for me, but still it was tiring to have these conversations over and over again maintaining enthusiasm and spunk.

A few cases were particularly bad:

Michael: acne-faced redhead carrying a backpack. His favorite things to do are eat and sleep. He likes Mexican food and he was a math major, of course. This is the visual. He was so incredibly awkward and would kind of sit there avoiding eye contact giving me simple one word answers and uncomfortable head nods. I checked the 'no' box for sure.

Rishikesh: dark skinned Middle Eastern looking guy. I asked him where he was from and he said Kansas City. Hmm.. not really what I meant.

Amjad: Pakistani dude and we spent most of the three minutes working out the phonetics of his name. He gave me an 8 out of 10 on my pronunciation. 'No' fo sho!

Other highlights included one guy telling me the details of his appendicitis and how much he vomited and insisted to his 'ma' that it wasn't just gas pains. Sounds like he lives with Ma. Definitely a no.

Another guy told me about how he got really drunk, puked in his friend's car then stripped off his shirt and ran home screaming "superman!" Nope.

One guy sat down and said right off the bat "go ahead and check the no box now. I can tell you're tall. I'm only 5'9". Tall women like tall men." You can imagine how much fun the rest of the 2 minutes and 45 seconds were. Self proclaimed no.

Someone else told me he was from New Hampshire and I started laughing and said I always wanted to go there as a kid because I loved hamsters and I would remember the state name on my geography test by nicknaming it New Hamster. Seriously... who says stuff like this to strangers? Me apparently. He must've checked no for that.

At the end of the night my little yes or no ballot sheet looked like this all the way down.