My 50 Dates

So, this new girl and I had decided to get together… she wanted to buy a new used car and wanted to go with someone to the lot for a second opinion. Her current car was too expensive and too fancy and with the cost of gas as it is, it wasn’t economical. Having worked at an auto garage in my youth, I obliged.

So, we agreed to meet at a Sky Train station where she’d pick me up and we’d would head over to the lot to check the car out. I get to the 22nd st station and waited for a bit while she found her way there. It was a pretty fancy car… we chit chatted for a bit. She looked good… I mean, she was good looking, but she was dressed like one of the ladies from the Golden Girls. She gives me the directions she wrote down on a piece of paper. She didn’t know the area that well and she wanted me to navigate while she drove…. and I don’t know the area either because I don’t go there. We were in New West and the dealership was somewhere on Lougheed.

I look at the directions and they are written like so:

• L onto Jamison St
• R onto 4th Ave
• L onto 17th Street
• L onto Smith

Which is great…. if you start off on a street that’s connected to Jamison, otherwise they are pretty much useless. So, I asked her if she knew where Jamison was.. and shes like “No.. I thought you might”. Good times. She said she could figure her way to Lougheed as she’s been here for work before.

After driving for about 20 minutes, she had to stop off at a gas station to get some better directions.

So, we’re driving and getting to know each other.. and she loves to talk… a lot…. about herself. She tells me about this new car she currently has, and she bought it because it looked really nice, and she looked really nice in it. Then she shows me the navigational system it has… at the push of a button, a computer monitor slowly pops up on the dash and using GPS it shows you exactly where you are and where you are going. You can even put your destination in and it’ll tell you what turns to make to get there. Pretty sweet eh? Now, why wouldn’t one use that…. why would one write directions like she had on a notebook instead of using the GPS system? Gooood question.

As we’re driving along in Brentwood, she decides to call up the dealership just to make sure we’re going in the proper direction. She’s talking to the receptionist and tells her we’re going on Lougheed and are passing by an Ikea and a mall with a restaurant in it. Dude… I didn’t see an Ikea, nor a mall. So I said “Umm.. there is no Ikea.” She gives me the hand and commences to talk to the receptionist. The receptionist didn’t know where we were.. and this girl.. hey, we haven’t given her a name… let’s call her Crazy Bitch.. so Crazy Bitch starts getting mad at the receptionist for not knowing which way we should be going. I mean, Crazy Bitch called the receptionist stupid.

I was taken aback. Crazy Bitch tells the receptionist that she wants to talk to her manager… and the receptionist gets Crazy Bitch’s number so that the manager can call her back. I was kind of silent because the situation didn’t really make sense to me. How can you get mad at someone for not knowing where you are and give you proper directions… when you write the directions in a notebook starting off at a location you don’t know where it is… and all the time having a play by play GPS system in your car? Crazy Bitch starts telling me how dumb the receptionist is, and that they should fire her.. I said “How can you say that? The lady is just doing the best she can.. and I don’t see an Ikea or a Mall”. Crazy Bitch said that she knew they were coming up and we’d get to them eventually. Wow. Just Wow.

So, the Manager calls and Crazy Bitch tells him how dumb his receptionist is and that she is a potential paying customer and how is it that they are so incompetent that they can’t give her proper directions to their place of business. Oh my. So, we’re on Lougheed mall and she’s trying to tell him where exactly we are - the Manager determines that we are going on the opposite direction and that we should turn around. Although, being on a highway, it’s difficult to do so… at which point Crazy Bitch spots an exit into Surrey.. we are in the right most lane, and the exit is off of the left most lane. Crazy Bitch asks the Manager if she should take the exit… the Manager wasn’t sure where the exit went, or if we took the exit, that it would be easy to turn around. Crazy Bitch starts shouting at him, saying he had to make a decision because we had to either take it or not as it was coming up.

I was still mortified that someone could treat a complete stranger in this manner. Especially when they are doing their best to help you out. Like seriously.. I was afraid my own moms was going give me a lesson or two just associating with someone who treats another person with such disrespect.

Suddenly, Crazy Bitch yanks the steering wheel to the left and we cross 3 lanes of traffic to take the exit. Cars are honking at us as we cut them off, and we take the exit. She gets mad at the Manager saying that we’ve now taken the exit, and it’s his job to figure out how we get to his dealership. The Manager says he’ll have to consult a map and get back to her. We’re now heading into Surrey. It’s now just under 2 hours later, I’m looking at the traffic going the other way, because at some point we’ll have to turn around… and the traffic is backed up and slow. My truck is at the Sky Train station like 15 minutes away from where we were.. and truthfully, I just wanted to get away from her. So, I asked her if she could drop me off at the Sky Train station so I could go home, because I don’t have another 2 hours to spare. (I haven’t had food in 3 hours)

My gosh. That was a mistake, she started to drive really fast and started to get mad at me. She said that she was counting on me and that if I didn’t have the time I should have told her so that she didn’t waste her time with me. I tried to diffuse the situation by saying that we can go another time, I still would like to help her out, it’s just that I’m pretty much back home right now and I don’t feel like trekking back and forth all over again. She suggested that we could go check the car out and then go for dinner. Hell No I thought.. I don’t want to have dinner with this chick.. I just want to get as far away from her as I could. So, I said No Thanks. She was driving all erratically because she was upset and I seriously, was scared we were going to hit something. I looked over at her and she had the look of Murder in her eyes. I couldn’t stop smiling. The situation just made no sense. You had to be there. It was too comical to be real.

I told her to get into the left hand lane because the turn off to the sky train station was coming up, and I told her where to turn left. So, she’s in the left hand lane about to turn left… but then she says “You know, how about I just drop you off at the other Sky Train station and then you can take the Sky Train station back to your truck”. WTF? So, she gets out of the left hand turn lane and starts to go strait. Dude, I can see the station where my truck is and she’s taking me elsewhere so that it’s on her terms.

I was like screw this, I can make a dash for it now.. we were in the middle of the intersection to turn left. And I got out of the car and told her to have a nice day. Cars were honking, but I didn’t care. I got out and walked back to my truck.

She sped off.

Never saw her again. But I kept her phone number on my phone under ‘Crazy Bitch’. When I’m having a really bad day or just want to vent… I’ll call her number and hang up when she answers, just to piss her off.

Ahh yes. Third time’s the charm isn’t it? One of my friends always says that good things come in threes. One day, out of boredom, I had gone on the site, browsing profiles and came across this gem. Her profile was short, to the point and her pictures made my heart leap out of the prison of my chest. There was one in particular where she was at a wedding in an indian suit and the picture was taken without her knowing; it in she was laughing. I’ve never seen a more innocent, vulnerable yet beautiful picture in such a great time. So I sent her a message saying I wanted to get to know her better. The same day she replied saying she too felt the same. The next day we were talking.

And holy cow did we talk. Every day we talked at least three or four times. She would call me on her breaks from work and I would call at night. We clicked instantly, had much to share about everything, and in every conversation we laughed a lot. Over the span of the weekend we must have talked a good three or four hours a day. It was great. It was like a dream… alas; the nightmare was just about to begin!

So, we decided to get together on the Monday, as we had been talking for about three days, she had Monday off and could come downtown. Now, I’m kinda old fashioned.. comming from a small town. It kinda bugged me that she was comming to pick me up, rather than I picking her up. But… what can one do?

Sunday night I had trouble falling asleep.. I’ve always been a night owl and started to get used to getting up before 6am, but since we had been talking till 3am every night, I had trouble falling asleep and probably only got 2 hours of sleep that night. Waking up Monday, I felt exhausted. On top of that, the weather turned sour as well and it had been raining all day. I had the blues man… the last thing I wanted was to go out with someone.

The day went on and by the time I got off work I was spent man. I just wanted to go home and sleep, but it would have been impolite to cancel on her. She called around 6pm as she was driving downtown (she lives in Van). So I gave her directions to get to the train station, but she got lost. So I waited in the rain till she found the place.

So, the initial meet is always awkward, because you feel like you know the person after talking to them soo much, but at the same time you still don’t. She didn’t really look like her picture, but she also kinda did; if that makes sense. No biggie though, she had a beautiful smile. I’m wondering if I look like myself in real life compared to my picture.

Anyhow we decided to goto Cactus Club for dinner and we parked on Robson pretty much right half a block away from the restaurant. Sat down, ordered…. aaaand… nothing. I couldn’t think of a thing to say or talk about. It was really weird. The stuff that came out of my mouth was pathetic and I after saying it I was like wtf? Did I really just say that? My 13 year old nephew has more game and more style than I did that day.

She was concerned that she hadn’t paid at the meter so I told her I’d go out and take care of it, mainly cuz I just wanted to get out of there to shake my head and take a break. I walked to her Jeep and tried to put money in the meter but the dang thing wouldn’t take my money. It had a number on it that  you can call to pay, but you need a credit card.. and I don’t have a credit card, but I called it anyways to try to talk to someone… the line was busy. On the other side of the street were some dudes wearing City of Vancouver vests so I asked them about the meter, but they didn’t know anything. Not much more I could do, so I walked back to the restaurant and told her, but due to the noise in the restaurant I guess she didn’t hear me, and I figured the way the night was going we’d probably be done dinner pretty quick.

Dinner was alright, it was hard to find something to converse about - maybe it was cuz we talked each others ears off the days previous, maybe it was cuz the day just wasn’t vibing, maybe it was cuz instead of looking into her big brown eyes and thinking about the future, I was thinking about my head laying upon my nice soft pillow. Such is life.

I paid for dinner thinking how I kinda felt bad for her as the date lacked spark and romance. We walked back to her Jeep and uuh… golly, there was a parking ticket. She looked at it funny and I tried to plead my case but I don’t think she was impressed. And honestly, at that point I didn’t really care.. cuz I thought it was pretty dang funny. So I laughed a little.. and dang, that really didn’t impress her. She called the number on the meter to try to resolve things saying that I had tried blah blah blah, but the person on the other end just said that she’d have to call the number on the ticket.

Sooo.. she went to drop me off at the Skytrain, but instead of hitting up Waterfront where she picked me up, she went to Burrard because it was closer, I presume because she was concerned about saving the environment and wasting gas… not cuz she was trying to get rid of me faster.

Aahh yes, I said goodbye, got on the train.. and midway on the ride home it dawned on me that I should have probably offered to pay for the ticket. Heh. Such is life.

We still talk now and then, but you know, if that initial chemistry is not there, it’s almost twice as hard, if not impossible to create it after the fact.

Live and learn.