The 15 Minute Dating Blog

by Cindy Embleton.

A Scene in New York

I ventured into a coffee shop in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when I suddenly saw her.

Thumbing through the pages of her photography magazine, she glanced up to check the time, surveyed the room, then slipped back into a universe of shutters and fitted lenses.

I returned to my laptop and sipped my tea. She didn’t know who I was, and I wasn’t about to tell her.

“She” was a member of my online dating service, intellectConnect.com, and a reminder of just how small the world really is. I remembered seeing her at one of our events, and respected her enough not to blow her cover.

So it goes when you operate an online dating service-you always meet with the weird and unexpected. And believe me, you’ll never predict most of the things that end up happening.

The perks are that you get to wake up late and work at home in your underwear, and no one knows the difference (unless they read this article. Ahem.)…but approving profiles and hosting events are only about 15% of your job.

Voices and Visions

“I can’t read your Web site,” he wrote one day, in more of a “help me” tone than an aggravated one.

What’s he talking about? No one knew. He explained further, “I’m legally blind, and I use an electronic screen reader. It reads the words on a Web page aloud so that I know what they say. The screen reader doesn’t work on your site.”

Apparently, this guy had held down an impressive writing career throughout most of his life, all through the help of his screen reader, an e-mail account, and that bottomless information source called the Internet. Amazing!

We were dumbfounded by such an incredible invention-and clueless as to how to make our site compatible with it.

We must have placed dozens of phone calls. Finally, with the help of the screen reader manufacturer (and several days of trial and error), we were able to reshuffle our site in a way that worked perfectly with his system. An unbelievable learning experience, and as usual, something you’d never expect.

Dan Saves the Day

“Hi, this is CBS News. We’d like to do an interview about Intellect Connect.”

“Oh, like hell it is. Gary, can we add an extra mail filter to get rid of all of this freakin’ spam, please?”

That was my initial reaction when I first received that e-mail. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it really was CBS News.

“Oh my God! I’ve been working in my underwear for the past two years. I need to go buy a nice-looking outfit, NOW!”

Before I move on to the part where I actually got dressed, I need to explain something: intellectConnect.com is designed for nerdy people like me-I love classical music, NPR, documentaries, keeping up on current events, I visit galleries and museums regularly, and I like talking about literature. I know. Yawn. It really spells “boring” to lots of people. So, I created my Web site for people with these interests. This notion is apparently so radical that the press calls periodically to make sure they heard it right.

After cobbling together the best outfit I could manage (my fashion sense is nonexistent, so this just means that I remembered to put on socks), I shot up to Boston for the interview.

“We might not air this,” they warned me right in the beginning, “We have lots of stories, and we’re filming this one as filler in case we need it.” Fair enough. I was just happy to be there. The camera started rolling, and the questions spilled out like money from a slot machine. Then, unknowingly, I played the winning hand.

“Do you know any funny online dating stories?” My friend, Dan, immediately came to mind. He’s a Puccini fan-a nerd like me-and was looking for a woman who loves opera. He joined an online dating service and did a keyword search for “opera.” Four results surfaced, more than he might have expected.

Excitedly, he raced to read their profiles-and discovered that in all four cases, they had misspelled “Oprah.”

The story amused CBS and got us a short television segment. As for Dan, the search continues. And me? I’m still sitting behind the screen, answering e-mails, promoting members’ gigs, and catching the occasional opera with Dan whenever he’s in town.
　　
About the author: Cindy Embleton is a zealous food enthusiast and former culinary writer-she’s never met a plate of ceviche she didn’t like. In addition to online matchmaking, she enjoys financial analysis (don’t get her started on kinky things like widening yield spreads), medical writing (helps big time for Balderdash), and promoting the work of unknown artists. She’s acted in an independent film and once had a regular stint as a singer for musical demos. She and her partner met online.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Dating and Relationships Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.