Sprung At Last

There are two weeks in between when Mr. Unusual and I make our penciled-in plans and the actual day of the plans. I know a lot about him, and after Match#4 doesn’t quite work out, I’m looking forward to chatting with him.

One evening, as I’m sitting on the sofa, a message pops up in my email: Mic Management has sent me a connection request on linkedin, the professional networking site. At first, I can’t quite place the name, and then I can’t quite place the professional connection, and then I read the message.

” It looks like you’re a pretty good sleuth. I look forward to meeting you.”

I stare at my iPad and think for a minute and then I realize: I had been to his linkedin profile, which popped up on the list of google hits when I searched his name. I go to my own linkedin profile, and discover something I had never known before: There’s a list of people who have looked at your profile, along with their profile pictures and a link to their own resumes.

His linkedin picture is the same as his match.com picture.

So is mine.

I panic briefly and then realize, well, this isn’t so bad. He knows I graduated cum laude and went to some top schools. He knows I’ve worked at some top investment banks and some top people there have said some first-rate things about me in a public forum.

I feel like a goof, but I’m not really looking too bad here. And it would be hard for him to be offended or mad about this because his match.com profile opened with the statement, “I am probably one of the most curious people you will ever meet.”

Really, we have an awful lot in common.

And, as much as you can read tone into an email, his tone seems more amused than annoyed.

I accept his “connection request” so that I can reply but then discover I can just reply to his email directly – it’s provided me with his actual email in the “reply to” field. So I respond:

“I can’t decide if I’m amused or embarrassed but since your email made me laugh, I’ll go with amused.”

I spend the rest of the evening, and much of the next day, bringing my linkedin profile up-to-date, and finding out what other handy features they’ve added since the last time I visited.

So, I know a few things about Mr. Unusual, apart from the fact that he’s a man who makes plans he has no intention of following through on. First, he lives in Seattle. Second, he has an unusually spelled first name.

One of my hobbies is genealogy, and here’s a fun little fact: people with names like Zipporah are a hell of a lot easier to find than people with names like Mary.

I go to Facebook. I enter his first name in quotes to restrict results to the unusual spelling of “Mic.” I restrict the location to Seattle.

Oh, look, a 1930’s Chesterfield ad picture.

Same guy. It took me about thirty seconds to find him.

But he’s fairly smart, and he’s mostly got his Facebook page locked down, except for a few photos. I leaf through them. He doesn’t appear to be married. He has a young son, which he had mentioned in his match profile – a cute little boy.

And then there’s a picture of him being interviewed on Fox News. There’s a Viagra logo on the screen, which he makes a joke about and some of his five hundred Facebook friends make further jokes about.

Married was one reason to be secretive, but that doesn’t seem to be the issue here. This is someone who maybe has a bit more to protect – maybe some justification for not giving out too much information?

Since I now have his full name, I just go ahead and google it, and much to my surprise, I get dozens of hits: A website, an Amazon author page, and some interviews on YouTube, among other things.

It turns out that Mr Unusual is a business consultant with a bunch of patents and a published book on his list of accomplishments.

I watch a couple of the videos. He’s well-spoken, well-dressed, and confident – all the things The Departed was not, but more to the point, the kind of person I always pictured myself with, but never seem to end up with. I guess my first husband was like that, on the surface, and it’s true, we looked lovely together in pictures. You can’t see narcissistic personality disorder in pictures.

I like this guy. I email a link to my father, and he likes the guy too. Confident, he says. Intelligent, I say. I’m not nervous, either, because I think: I can hold my own with this guy. I’m a Vice President at an investment bank. I read financial press and investment reports and deal with Harvard MBA’s all day long. And we have similar interests – fine dining and travel.

This, I think, is a good match.