Plenty Of Stinky Fish

Plenty of rotten fish, spineless fish, slimy fish, cheap fish, dull fish, ugly fish, dumb fish, and late fish. 
But it's better known to the general public as 'Plenty of Fish', a dating website. Some refer to it as P.O.F. Or more realistically, once you consider how fast the actual date will make you want to disappear from the restaurant table, 'P.O.O.F.'.

This is a dating website that should be avoided at all costs. But that’s redundant. All dating websites should be avoided at all costs. However, there was this one stray fish who somehow snuck through the cracks. Recently, I've become one of these people who despise hours of lengthy emails and text messages. Why drag out the torture, when so much can be determined from a phone call. Especially when for women, a bad voice on the phone is an automatic deal breaker. So I’d personally rather just get on the phone and see if we either a} can have a stimulating conversation, and as importantly b} make sure his voice doesn’t sound like he's had a recent tracheotomy. 

We talked on the phone, and his voice passed inspection. It was fine, but the conversations being spewed by the voice were more or less the audible versions of a bottle of Ambien taken with a handle of whiskey. Beyond underwhelming and borderline suicide inducing. Like I was on the phone with my dry cleaners, trying to muster up some type of physical chemistry by discussing the chronological history of a lint brush.


Shoot me.

He asks me out for that coming Saturday night. Not for dinner, heaven forbid, but just to meet to see if we weren’t revolted by the sight of each other. I was already revolted by the inane conversation, so I couldn’t imagine the actual personification of this conversation resulting in a bigger, more gaggier revulsion.

Crap. Now what.

Well, I was meeting some friends out later on that evening, so initially, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal to meet up for a few drinks prior to that. And as everyone that's done Internet dating knows, you need a plan; If it's going well, you just stay out. But for the inevitability of it going horribly, you must prepare. This is done by first prepping your friends that within the first 10 minutes of meeting your date, you might be bolting into the public bathroom to send them the infamous S.O.S. text message, instructing them to call you immediately with some sudden, fictitious broken down car stories, or possibly some type of life threatening emergency that can only be resolved by you and you only. (You know, "she needs a kidney and we're both the same blood type." I don't know. Make it up.) So it's vital that your friends be kept apprised of the dates status, via live stream Tweets, so you can flee on a dime if the need should arise. 

And it always does.

I'm beginning to think that my dates must think my friends are the most accident prone, organ dependent, needy cluster of people on the planet.

OK, so the boring guy and I pick a time. 8:00 was my original time, but he said he was hoping to spend more time with me, even though he must've heard me hacking into my toilet as he said that.

He asked if we could do 7:00. A bit early for my comfort level. I was hoping to drown out his dullness in a bustling room of colorful alcoholics a little later on. But then again, meeting him a little earlier would leave me a greater bed of time to make fun of him after I left.


7:00 he wants? 
7:00 it is.

I walk into the bar, 6:59 P.M. I wait until 7:05, sit down and politely text him letting him know there's parking right next door, and I’m sitting at the bar. I also tell him he can’t miss me, since at 7:00 on a Saturday night, I’m of course the only asshole in the entire place ( the edited version of that ).

He sends me a text back: “Be there in like 15.”

Wait. What's that sound? I hear an umpire. 

He yells: “Strike 1!”
(Actually Strike 27 if you count the grueling 10 minutes of lame phone conversation, but let’s try and forget that for now. Because even starting at 1, come the end of this date, the umpire's coming down with an acute case of laryngitis).

I don't get this. A full-grown man asks out a full-grown woman. He bumps up the time a full hour earlier. I practically run over every squirrel and baby groundhog to get here on time, and ...“Like” 15??

I’ll be gone in “Like 13 and a half”.

Unreal. A 40 year old dude that can't be on time. Disgusting. This is why I usually date younger guys. The older ones are so irresponsible.

I take out my card and order a drink. An apple-pear martini.

And now I need to kill "...Like 15 minutes". 

Let the friend texting / man shreddage commence.

Just as I was just finishing up my second drink, and texting my friend that I wasn't staying any longer, I feel someone tap me on my shoulder. Here he his.

34 minutes late.

No apology, no acknowledgment of being late, and a severely annoying poke on my shoulder.

(Umpire: “Strike 2!”)

I turn around and see he’s wearing a beigey/grey t-shirt that was so wrinkled that by comparison it made a Shar-Pei puppy look ironed and starched.

(Umpire: “Strike 3!)

Me: “Oh hey, how are you. I’m sorry, did we say 7:34? I thought you emphatically said 7:00."

He kind of smiles, makes a stupid shrug with his shoulders, and basically ignores the question.

(Strike 4!)

The bartender asks him if he’d like a drink. He orders a Bud Light, (Strike 5!), and puts it on my tab, and then tells me I look exactly like a girl on TV (who I look nothing like), that he has a mad crush on.

(Strike, errr…13!!!)

Not only was he wearing a t-shirt that rivaled a ball of aluminum foil that was sat on by an elephant, and somehow peeled itself back open and molded into a homeless persons shirt, but I glance down and see he’s wearing a pair of ancient filthy sneakers, which were being tickled by pants that were so shredded at the bottom, they could’ve been used in a car wash in replace of those soapy dancing car noodles. Except unlike the car wash dancing soap noodles, his stringy pants noodles didn’t look like they ever had a proper introduction to soap.


At least be one. Either late. Or sloppy. If you’re always late, you better make sure you dress to kill. If you’re a fucking slob, you better be an on-time fucking slob. But whatever you do, don’t be a late, unforgiving, sloppy, cheap, tab-hijacking, boring, car wash noodle fucking wearing slob. Just a helpful dating tip.

Maybe it was a blessing. Because after nights like those, I always seem to find God again.

I'm sitting there thinking, “Please Dear God. Please God. Please. God? Don’t make me sit here any longer than I have to. My mother fell down a flight of stairs when she was pregnant with me, broke her water in her first month, laid in bed with me for 8 months, and I survived. I was on my death bed with Lyme disease for over 3 years. I’ve been tested enough. And I’m pretty sure I genuinely can’t make it through this horrid date / t-shirt disaster. Please God, set the restaurant on fire so I’ll have to run out mid sentence. If you do, I promise from now on I’ll just have sex to make babies. See you in church on Sunday. Swear. (Sorry God. No swearing.)"

I'm sorry but whether we want to believe it or not, first impressions are everything. That’s why when you go on a job interview, you don’t show up wearing a track suit, eating scrambled eggs with an armadillo in tow. And casual is one thing. I'm all for casual. Casual is great. Jeans and a nice button down or a pull over. But from head to toe, he was wearing something more like it was pulled-apart. This was like Friday Casual Dress Down Day at the oil refining factory.


Shoot me again. But this time do it so it actually pierces my front temporal lobe and kills me quickly.

And if this is him when he’s trying, what’s gonna  happen after 5 dates with him. 10 dates. When he's comfortable. He’s gonna meet you out in a used contractor bag and banana leaves for shoes, that’s what'll happen.

And guess what, if you’re going to show up looking like you pulled an all nighter with your drinking buddies, your intelligence and personality best be off the chart. And like I said, he was about as exciting as talking to a wet cotton ball. A wet, wrinkled cotton ball. Now I can at least die knowing, if a cotton ball were to talk, I’d know exactly what it would sound like. And it'd be late.

At this point, my normally talkative self apparently decided to go into hibernation for survival purposes, and was replaced by a reticent, bathroom-going, coaster-playing, bitch. (FYI guys…when a woman goes to the bathroom after meeting you for the first time, within 5 minutes of saying hello, she’s leaving in 10 minutes.)

He finally finishes his first shitty free drink, and orders another one. I think this time around he went for the upgrade and got a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and evidently decided to simply rollover the previous "Ordering Beers On My Tab" plan.

(Strike…what number are we on?...)

The depth of boredom in talking to this guy in person, actually made our previous phone conversation about road signs in Yonkers or guitar parts or whatever it was, seem like we were previously unraveling the origins of the universe. So for the remaining 5 minutes, I joyfully brought up guitar parts.


After a painful 45 minutes of what seemed like death by fire ants, I tell him I have to leave in a few minutes to meet up with some friends for dinner. "Have" being the integral word.

He asks me if I’d like another drink.

I said: “Awww no…that’s kind of you, but I’ve already bought myself enough drinks tonight. And I also want to be sure that when I tell my friends about you, and I’m throwing up, they know it’s because I’m describing you, and not that I just have liquor poisoning.”

The S.O.S. call finally comes in. It's my awesome friend, who upon my death, I shall bequeath all my worldly possessions 
(Which at that point could've been within 5 minutes). The call. That beautiful, "sorry dude, gotta go!" call. I stood up, shook his hand, bullshitted something about "nice meeting you", and left leaving a dust trail like the ones where Road Runner is being chased by Wiley Coyote.


The next day he called and asked me out for the following weekend.

I simply told him I couldn’t do it because he had way too much laundry to catch up on.


Clueless fish.

;)~