Matchmakers 2.0 (A Novel Nibbles title) (3 page)

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 trying 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.

Miri giggled on her way out the door.  “Call it the ‘pants-on-fire’ flag.”

Derrick laughed and started singing “Liar, liar pants on fire” under his breath.  We’re petty—I admit it.  That’s how we stay sane.

“Hey, Mick.”  I paused on my way out of the conference room.  Derrick was blushing again.  “Thanks for hooking me up with Lily.” 

I must have looked clueless.

“The data analyst?  You told me to call her.  She’s great.”

Jeez, that was fast.  “Really?  Did you guys get together?”

He blushed some more.  “We met for a picnic in Duke Gardens.  We walked around until two in the morning.  She’s amazing.  So thanks.”

I watched him kind of float out of the room.   Derrick spent several hours walking with a girl in a flower garden and talking?  That was hard to compute.  It was also totally adorable.  And unfair.  Maybe I should start picking dates from my résumé pile.

Chapter 6

After sneaking off to go hiking for the weekend, I came back to a flood of date requests.  I decided maybe the problem with Chris had been that he’d picked me, so I ignored all of the requests and randomly picked someone from my match list that hadn’t contacted me.  Sam was a writer, twenty-nine, and had decent reports from his first two dates.

Sam suggested we hook up at Cosmic Cantina.  Which either meant he was really cheap, or had awesome taste.  Cosmic makes the best burritos in the state, but it’s not exactly swank, and neither are the prices.  I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe he was a struggling writer.

As usual, I arrived early.  I snagged a table on the patio and prayed this warm spring evening wouldn’t turn out like the last one.

It started better.  When Sam arrived, he didn’t have any sidekicks in tow and he looked exactly like his picture.  I waved him over.

“Hey, are you Mick?” he said.  “I didn’t see a picture of you in your profile, so I wasn’t sure what you looked like.”  I’d forgotten about not putting up a picture.  Bonus points for Sam, then, for accepting a date with no photo.

“I am.  Nice to meet you.  Sorry, I forgot I hadn’t put up a picture, yet.”

He had a nice, crinkly grin.  “You might want to get on that.  With a name like Mick, you might get some interesting matches, otherwise.  What’s Mick short for, or is that third-date material?”

I laughed.  “Married-with-kids material, or at least meeting my mother and worming it out of her.”

“Any other terrible secrets I should know about before we grab some burritos?”

None I was willing to share, particularly since Sam hadn’t creeped me out in the first sixty seconds.  In the legendary world of my dating exploits, that’s a pretty good sign.

I shook my head.  “Let’s eat.  Have you been here before?  The deluxe burrito is awesome.”

Sam grinned.  “I’m a single guy, a writer, and my place is down the street.  I practically live here.  I’ll go get the burritos.  You want a beer to go with that?”

Cute, easy to talk to, sense of humor.  He had to have some awful secret.  Yeah, I’m jaded; it’s an occupational hazard.

Sam returned in a couple of minutes, two Sierra Nevadas in his hands.  “They’re pretty backed up in there, so the burritos will be a minute.”

“You don’t have VIP status?”

“There’s a pretty big crowd that eats here daily.  We’re trying to talk them into serving breakfast, too.  Then I could probably sell my fridge.”

Uh-oh.  Hawking household appliances didn’t sound financially stable.  “Starving writer?”

Sam was distracted.  “Huh?  Oh, sorry, no.  I just need more places to put my books.  Kitchens are underused as book storage, don’t you think?”

“What’s caught your attention?”  I figured she was curvy and scantily clad.

Sam looked a little embarrassed.  “Sorry.  People watching is an occupational hazard for a writer.  I was just looking at that old couple over there in the corner.  They look like they’re on their first date.  It’s sweet.”

I looked over and nearly choked on my beer.  There was Hazel, and I was pretty sure that was one of the guys we’d matched her up with.  I’d handled her file personally.  She caught me looking and gave me a wave and a thumbs-up.

Sam looked at me with interest.  “You know her?”

“Only a little.  I met her at the library.”  I lied.  Sue me.  Sometimes, the truth does not set you free. 

“You like to read?”

“I do.  My library fines could probably fund a small third-world country.  I’m thinking about getting a Kindle, though.”

Our food arrived.  There is nothing that smells as good as a Cosmic deluxe burrito. Sam shuffled things to fit on our very small table.

“I sell a lot of books on Kindle,” he said.  “But I still like my dead-tree books.  If I can’t sell my fridge, I might have to get a bigger condo.  I’m running out of book-storage space.”

“Have you written anything I might have read?”

Sam laughed.  “Not if you stick to libraries.  They don’t tend to stock my stuff.”

“What, you write about evolution?”  Here in the South, that could definitely get you banned from the library shelves.

Sam choked on his beer.  “Not exactly.”  He took a deep breath.  “I write erotica.”

That’s pretty much guaranteed to be a first-date conversation stopper. 

I only had a vague idea of what erotica entailed, other than lots of sex.  There were a couple of books I’d snuck under my covers as a teenager, but I had no idea if they were very representative.

Sam was watching me closely.  I had no idea what to say.  My date writes sex for a living—or maybe not.  “Can you make a living doing that?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, actually.  I write sci-fi, too, but it doesn’t sell nearly as well.  Erotica pays for the condo; sci-fi covers the burritos.”

I had to ask.  “Do you tell this to all your first dates?”

He shook his head.  “No.  Just the ones that seem to be going well.”  He sighed.  “I’m Catholic.  If I’m not honest with the women I like, I feel guilty.”

“Writing erotica doesn’t trigger your Catholic guilt?”  Now there’s a sentence you don’t get to say on your average first date.

Sam’s eyes danced.  “Some of it might.  My stuff’s steamy, but pretty vanilla.  There are some Catholic theologians who believe sex is a way of feeling closer to God.”

Damn.  The way to my heart is definitely through my mind.  “You’ve got to be kidding.  I thought Catholics frowned on sex, except for procreation.”

“That would be the mainstream.  The nice thing about being Catholic is that there are lots of cool fringes.  I took some theology in college along with my writing courses.”

“And when did that lead to writing erotica?”

“About the time my student loans ran out, and I needed to pay the bills.  A friend of mine tried it first, and his book advance was a very motivating figure.  I found out I was good at it, so it kind of stuck.”

I was trying to shut down my weird meter.  Sam seemed like a really nice guy, but it was hard to get past him spending hours every day writing sex scenes.  Maybe he hated it.  “Are you hoping to write other stuff one day?”

“I do write other stuff.  I have a sci-fi series published.”  He took a bite of his burrito and grinned.  “People say the sex scenes in the sci-fi are really good.  But really, writing erotica’s not so bad.  I get to write all day, which I love.  And I get to think about sex a lot, which really, if you’re a guy, is a good thing.”

Well, there were worse day jobs.  “How do you get inspiration for your writing?  It seems like there’s only so many ways to have sex.”  I blushed.  That hadn’t come out right.

Sam chuckled.  “That’s what plot is for.”  He gestured toward Hazel and her date.  “I’m thinking they’d make some great inspiration for my next book.”

I contemplated matching Sam and Hazel up for their next dates.  They’d probably get a huge kick out of each other.

Sam clearly thought we’d done enough talking about him.  “So, what do you do?  Your profile said you were a scientist.”

Oh, the tangled webs we weave.  “Sort of.  I work for MatchMakers.”

It took a minute for him to make the connection.  “Seriously?  What do you do?  Wait.  Is this a real date, or are you married with three kids and just doing research?”  He looked moderately disappointed at that possibility.

“Nope, this is personal time.  I lost a bet with my best friend, so I had to put my name in our system.  I suck at finding my own dates.”

Sam laughed.  “Not everyone who uses online dating is desperate.”  His eyes narrowed.  “Are they?”

“No, not really.  About half the people we see get matched pretty quickly.  It doesn’t all turn into marriage and three kids, but they hook up with someone.  The other half range from desperate to totally creepy.”

Sam shrugged.  “I’ve only had two dates before tonight, but they both seemed pretty normal.”

I told him about my date with Chris.  He laughed.  Probably more fodder for his writing.  Yeah, I was having a hard time getting past the erotica.