Look Before You Leap

Before I went on the date with the ND Hater, I looked up the neighborhood pizza joint I had suggested as an option should he want to come to my neighborhood, so I could give him the correct cross street. I clicked onto Yelp, for no particular reason since I’d already been there and knew I liked the place, and happened across a review for a guy I thought was pretty attractive.

The top of his review read that he was a junkie of the place, and when I clicked onto his Yelp profile I noticed he said he slummed around the city neighborhood that I actually lived in. He had written a number of reviews, and while I myself am not the kind of person who (a) provides public reviews or (b) would include a picture along with said reviews, he had reviewed some places I would definitely enjoy. And he seemed local. I totally wanted to email him. But I didn’t, mostly since I couldn’t think of anything relevant to email him about.

And then the craziest thing happened. I got to the pizza joint before the ND Hater, and as I was sitting in the bar overflow area scanning the actual bar to see if two stools were about to open up, I saw him. The Yelp guy! In the bar! I didn’t go over there to confirm, mostly because I assumed my actual date would be walking in at any moment, but clearly this was a sign!

I didn’t want to be a stalker, so I ran my plan to reach out to a full blown stranger by N the next day. As we emailed about the options I forwarded the link to his Yelp profile.

My excitement was all for naught, it seems, because N had the foresight to actually READ some of his reviews, and smack dab in the middle of the one was the statement that “his wife loved the hummus”.

What would I do without her? Not only had I not read through his reviews very carefully, I had missed the reference to his spouse in the one for the joint I had originally looked up. I am a lot of things, dear readers, but a thorough researcher has never been one of them.

Fortunately for me, I wasn't a stalker girl hitting on a married guy, either.