“Okay, here’s how it’s going to work.” I had gathered the regular group (minus Alicia) together in my office to go over some of the finer details. “I will screen the candidates here. If I believe they have dating potential for any one of us, I will send them to your offices for a quote un-quote ‘interview’. At the end of the week, we’ll reconvene and decide who wants who and who gets who.”
Katie nodded.
“Is this starting to sound kind of ugly and very unromantic?” Ella asked with a worry wrinkle appearing across her forehead.
“No.” I said emotionlessly.
Ella turned to Katie. Katie just shrugged.
“Let’s just get on with it. Our first ‘candidate’ is due to arrive any minute.”
“How many do we have today?” Katie asked.
“Five today and five tomorrow.”
“Wow! So many already?”
“I told you this would work. Didn’t I tell you?”
They nodded excitedly and left my office as the buzzer on my phone rang.
“Yes?” I said with my hand on the speaker button.
The voice of our friendly receptionist came through the phone. “You have a Blake Talley to see you.”
“Send him in.”
Three minutes later, a tall and beautiful blonde-haired man walked in my door and shook my hand.
“Have a seat,” I offered.
“Thanks. And thanks for asking me in for an interview. You just never know with those Internet job sites. Sometimes I feel like I’m just dumping my resume into some random trashcan somewhere.”
I laughed. “I know how you feel. But we try to carefully consider all of our resume submissions…through all sites.” I lied through my teeth. Not like I was going to say, “Yeah, I have a knack for picking out the best looking candidates solely based on their resumes and cover letters. It’s quite a talent.”
Blake shifted uneasily in his seat.
“So,” I started, looking down at the resume in front of me. “It says here that you were a volunteer for Doctors without Borders?”
“Yes, I spent a year in South America helping distribute medicine to sick children and their families."
“Mmm hmm. And how long were you at your last job?”
“About a year and a half.”
“And how long were you in your last serious relationship?”
Blake blinked in disbelief as if he had misunderstood me. “Excuse me?”
I waved my hand in the air as if to possibly wave some sort of normality into the question. “We find that people tend to handle relationships the same way they handle jobs. Finding out about a candidate’s relationship history can tell us a lot about the person.”
Damn, I was good.
Blake nodded but his expression still hadn’t changed. “Also a year and a half,” he replied guardedly.
“See what I mean?”
“I guess.”
“And why did you leave?”
“My last job?”
“No, your last relationship,” I stated matter-of-factly.
“Um, I don’t think that has anything to do with…”
“It’s simply to gauge your decision-making abilities and resoluteness. This job definitely requires someone who can make good decisions on his feet and stick to them.”
“I see,” he replied with hesitation. “Well, we just had different interests. We were very different people.”
Typical guy response, I thought. Very cliche, unoriginal “relationship-ending-excuses-in-a-box” answer. I made a note of it on my legal pad.
“And your last job? Why did you leave that?”
He relaxed somewhat with this relatively more normal question. “It all came down to career opportunities. I didn’t think that my last job offered me…”
“Great!” I exclaimed, as I shut my portfolio and pushed my chair back from my desk. “So I’ll send you off to meet with Katie, now. She’s a manager in the department you would be working in. I’m sure she’ll be very happy to meet with you.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me more about my qualifications?” Blake was genuinely confused at this point. I’m sure he had every right to be, but I had to give myself props at my ability to make the whole process seem like standard practice. Plus, now that I knew he was single, it was time to pass him along.
I shook my head. “No need. That’s what resumes are for, right? My job is to judge if your personality and your, you know…background is a good fit for the company. Which I think it is. So I’ll let Katie take it from here.”
Blake stood up abruptly. He reached out to shake my hand and immediately reverted back to the usual post-interview mode. “Well, thanks again for meeting with me. I hope we’ll speak again soon.”
I nodded. “I’m sure we will. Straight down the hall, office 409.”
“Thanks.” And with that, he left.
I quickly dialed Katie’s extension to warn her that Blake was coming and that she should pass him off to Ella when she was done with him. Then I marveled at how Blake, by the way I was talking about him, could have easily been confused for a bag of chips, or some other inanimate object. “Yeah, when you’ve had your fill of the Doritos, I think Ella wants some, so pass them down.”
I quickly shrugged it off. Guys refer to us as objects all the time. What’s so wrong about us turning the tables a bit?
* * *
By the time Friday came around, things couldn’t have been going better. Katie, Ella and I had met two former Doctors without Borders volunteers, three former Teach for America teachers, a beautifully sculpted (from what we could see through his suit) brunette who used to run P.E.T.A’s west coast publicity division after graduating from Stanford University, and a business school graduate who spent his first two years out of Harvard restructuring the business model for Habitat for Humanity. All were single, and all were incredibly gorgeous. I couldn’t have met this many eligible men if I went out to a different bar every night for the rest of my life. Guys like this don’t just fall in your lap. You have to get out there and search for them…or trick them into coming to you.
On Friday night the three of us went out for drinks to divvy up the specimens. Alicia agreed to meet us later once we had finished discussing our “dishonest and completely tasteless scheme to meet men.”
I pulled out a stack of resumes from my briefcase. “Okay, first off. Who’s going to take Alex?”
“Which one was he?” Ella asked.
“Alex, Alex…” I scanned his resume quickly. “Oh, he was the former regional manager of Big Brother/Big Sisters’ New York city branch. The one with those amazing blue eyes."
“Oh yeah!” Ella exclaimed. “I want him. I think we had a good connection.”
“Good. Done.” I handed her the resume and went on to the next one. “Jeremy.”
“Me!” Katie’s hand shot up into the air like a rocket ship.
Ella and I laughed. “Alright, if you feel that strongly about him.” I passed her the resume.
We spent about 30 minutes dividing out the rest of the resumes with surprisingly only two discrepancies and then discussed how we would handle the next-step phone calls. Each of us would call our assigned “candidates,” apologize for having made an offer to someone else, and then casually ask them out for drinks to offer advice about finding a job in the industry.
Alicia showed up, and the night turned into another normal evening of drinking, laughing, turning down intoxicated guys trying to hit on us, and eventually a cab ride home.
In the cab, I thought about my ex. I usually did after I had been drinking. I wondered what he and his fiancee were doing at that very moment. I wondered if she had to come up with some elaborate scheme to find him. Probably not. They probably met in some normal, everyday scenario. In line at the bank, both grabbing for the last box of pop tarts at the super market, receiving each other’s lunch deliveries by mistake. One of those cute little encounters that are supposed to happen to people everyday. Just not to me.
Just as I was about to slip back into my Hilary pity party of depression, I reminded myself about the stack of gorgeous eligible men waiting for me to call and ask them out. That made me feel better. And hey, if I ended up marrying one of them and eventually letting them in on the secret of our arranged, or more, deranged meeting, then this could make a rather cute story, too. A kind of, “Mommy met Daddy because she was so desperate, she had to trick men into coming into her life” type of story.