Sorry you've been left out on a limb with this story. I'll just bet that the morning was eventful!
Here's one that I hope will coax more stories, this one is closer to heaven.
I was unemployed one winter and trying to set up a database for my college alum association. I was trying out one of those God-awful pieces of software that look fine until you try to do something with it. Moreover, it was still in beta! There were so may bugs that I longed for a can of Raid. In despair, I called customer support, grim with the knowledge that I'd have some fancy explaining to do as to why I even had this software in my position.
Mirabile dictu, I got a human being! A knowledgeable, compassionate person who could take me through the fancy footwork needed to deal with the immediate problem.
However, I quickly encountered more problems and soon we were on the phone nearly every night (save weekends, when the company did not offer support!) One Monday, he called me before I had a chance to call, saying, "There has to be a problem, right? So here I am." Another Monday, he asked, laughing, "So, did you miss me?"
At peak hysteria, we were Fedexing disks back and forth. And, of course, we flirted a bit while walking through each painful adjustment.
When he left the unnamed company to go to work for Microsoft (doesn't everyone at some point), he called to tell me, gave me his home number in case I needed to reach him, and said how much fun it had been to work with me. I said that if I ever found myself out his way (I live in New York), I'd enjoy having dinner with him, putting a face to the voice.
Midsummer, I did have a business trip to Seattle, so I called and invited him to dinner. Well, my flight was execrably late and I arrived at the hotel, tired, crabby and disheveled, barely 15 minutes before he was supposed to pick me up for dinner--disaster in the making.
He called from the lobby when he arrived and, as I said to him, "We don't know what we look like and the lobby is huge! I have long blonde hair in a pony tail and am wearing a blue and white dress." His response: "Well, I have a beard too and I'm not wearing a dress." Most of my love life has tended to be the guys in suits for the last several years, yet I found myself heading off for dinner in a pickup truck with a ponytailed and bearded person, a person clearly a decade younger than I. (You haven't lived until you've hopped into a pickup wearing 3 1/2" heels!)
Dinner was wonderful, sitting on an outdoor terrace in lovely weather with a view of Mt. Ranier. We liked each other in person as much as we liked each other on the telephone...and the sexual electricity was palpable. We lingered talking for so long that the restaurant closed and we had to bang on the doors to get off the second-floor terrace; they had forgotten that we were there. We spent the night together and it was sufficiently fabulous that when the hotel wakeup call came, we were reeling from lack of sleep.
I thought that that would be the end of it, a night to remember, you know. Still we continued to talk on the phone now and then until he asked me to go away with him to the rain forest for a long weekend to celebrate my birthday. After dithering, I accepted. The intensity was still there.
It still is, 2 1/2 years later. We continued to see each other about once a quarter (like earnings releases!) until he became involved with someone. But we are still close friends--he gave me enormous telephone and ICQ support during a recent love life crisis--and our get-together last summer was white hot. As it will be again if we are both free at the same time.
I have friends who are deliberately trying difficult software in the hopes of such an experience! Beats a singles bar any time! |
