The Need for Speed

In an un-characteristic display of impulsiveness^* I booked my self onto a Speed Dating event this evening. Once I had dealt with the logistics of getting home and back into town in under and hour and a half I was stuck waiting in the bar for around 40 minutes trying to work out witty and entertaining questions to ask my 21 dates.

As it turns out I shouldn't of worried. The 3 minutes you get per person is doesn't really give too much scope for a conversation to go disastrously wrong. I found I could avoid the ever so predictable "Who, What, Why?" by simple random conversation and having a few off the wall questions in my back pocket in case of emergencies. The conversations themselves were pretty ephemeral^** and your are forced into making a snap decisions on someone as soon as the bell goes and moving on. I had a couple of conversations with previous "dates" during the breaks that did leave me wondering how much of the conversation I had been paying attention to. I suspect there was more than one pilot in the room :-) As the evening progressed I got a lot more comfortable in stretching the time boundaries and continuing chatting until the organisers came around with their (metaphorical) whips to move people on.

At the end of the evening I noticed I hadn't marked down many of my dates as either Yes, No or Friend despite only a few dates being definite Nos. If I'm following the spirit of "You will know if you click" that the system encourages that still leaves me with 6 ticks. I will find out in the next few days if any of them have been reciprocated.

All in all the fear and apprehension was rather quickly dissipated in the first few minutes of dating. I enjoyed it and got to meet a lot more interesting ladies than a typical night out clubbing. Something I can certainly recommend.